While tidepooling on the California Coast, I came across this sea star that was unlike any I’d ever seen before. Instead of being spiny and hard, it was soft and smooth.

Leather Stars usually have five wide arms. Their upper surface is blue-gray and mottled with red and orange. Their texture is smooth and slippery to the touch, somewhat like wet leather.

This animal feeds largely on sea anemones, sea cucumbers and Purple Sea Urchins. Occasionally they may eat sponges, hydroids and other marine invertebrates.

The Leather Star sometimes lives symbiotically with the scaleworm Arctonoe vittata. This worm lives in the tube foot grooves of the sea star.

Unlike many other sea stars, Leather Stars swallow their prey whole and digest it internally. They can grow to about 12 inches in diameter and have a distinctive smell that resembles garlic and sulphur.

In order to hunt for food, the Leather Star has sensors at the end of each arm that can detect prey.

Sea stars can reproduce sexually and asexually. They reproduce asexually by dividing their bodies and regenerating missing parts. The decapitated starfish limb can grow into a new sea star, so long as a part of the central body portion is attached.

Leather Stars are found from Prince William Sound, Alaska to San Diego, California. They live on rocky shores and in clean harbors on pilings and sea walls.

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The largely unnoticed creatures of kelp forests and tidepools often look like something out of a sci-fi movie. Strange sea anemones, odd fish and brightly colored Sea Slugs are fixtures in an underwater landscape. The Purple Sea Urchin is right at home in this environment; with its bright color and sharp spines. It’s hard to tell whether it’s a plant or an animal, let alone a species of this planet.

Despite its extraterrestrial look, it is an animal related to a starfish. Like the starfish, it lives along the rocky shores and sea floors on the Pacific Coast in shallow areas affected by the crashing waves. Also, like starfish, sea urchins have tube feet, but unlike the five legs of a starfish, tube feet cover the whole spiny external part of the sea urchin and enable it to move slowly using hydraulics.

Sea urchins feed mostly on algae and decaying organic matter, although they are known to eat kelp and sponges as well. The mouth of the sea urchin, located on the underside of its body, has five calcium carbonate teeth.

The sea urchin actually uses these teeth to “dig” into rocks, where it lodges itself for extended periods of time. In fact, if a sea urchin carves out a hideout for itself at a young age, it can grow too large over time and get stuck in its own hole.

Unfortunately, large groups of sea urchins can actually be detrimental to kelp forests. Sea urchins feed upon kelp and often eat the stems of the plant found near the rocky ocean floor. This effectively kills the entire kelp plant. It is often sea otter predation on the sea urchins that keeps sea urchin populations in check and preserves the kelp forests.

However, the sea urchin is not defenseless against these hungry predators. Its first line of defense is its sharp spines, which many divers can tell you are no joke. The next line of defense is the tiny stinging structures found in their spines, called pedicellarines.

Purple Sea Urchins are considered an indicator species. They are very sensitive to changes in their environment, and usually are one of the first in their ecosystems to show signs of distress when the water quality starts to decline. Stress in sea urchins often shows itself as drooping spines and a lack of movement.

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While tidepooling near San Francisco, I came across a number of these cool creatures. They are relatively large sea stars, with five arms and a rough texture. Their short spines on the upper surface are arranged in wavy patterns.

Most of them are either orange (ochre) or purple, and there is no explanation as to why they come in two dramatically different colors. The bottoms of each of its five stout arms are covered with thousands of tiny tube feet tipped with suction cups.

Ochre Sea Stars are classic intertidal animals. They have been called a “keystone species,” as their presence or absence significantly affects the entire community in the intertidal zone.

One of this animal’s favorite foods is mussels. Although slow-moving, it does wander about, searching for prey. When it finds a mussel, it wraps a its arms around it and is able to pull the mussel’s shell slightly apart.

To eat, sea stars extrude their stomach out through their mouth. They then lay their stomach on the soft tissue of their prey. Digestive juices from the stomach dissolve tissue and the stomach absorbs the dissolved material.

Also commonly known as the Pacific Sea Star, it can regrow a lost arm, though it may take a year to do so. It was a great experience to encounter these impressive, colorful tidepool residents.

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