Life under the pontoon: Breakfast time!

Coming back from taking Quirky for her long morning walk, both of us looking forward to breakfast, we noticed that someone was already busily tucking into his breakfast. A many armed starfish was greedily hugging and eating a dead Sharpnose puffer fish, right under the pontoon.

I say ‘greedily hugging and eating’ which sounds very active, but in fact, starfish do everything in slow motion. Starfish are extremely versatile and feed on almost anything that they find on the sea bottom, from sponges to fish. They eat by wrapping themselves around their prey. While they hold their prey in place, their stomach extrudes from their undersides and wraps around the prey, digesting it with their gastric juices. Luckily the Many armed starfish has many arms to hold the prey in place as this process takes hours.

This little puffer had died a few days ago and its body had floated around the pontoon. Now its body had sunk to the bottom and had become breakfast for the starfish.