Like most of the starfishes, this animal has a very curious way of protecting its eggs for some little time after they are laid. It heaps them all up together into a pile, and then bends its rays downwards in such a way that it stands upon their tips, looking just like a little table with twelve very stout legs! It turns itself into a sort of cage, in fact, with the eggs inside it, and so guards them carefully until they hatch.
The Brittle Starfish is certainly the very oddest of all odd creatures, for it not only grows new rays if the old ones should be torn off, but actually breaks itself into pieces if it is startled or alarmed! And it is such a timid animal that a slight touch, or even a shadow suddenly falling upon it, will alarm it! Then it gives a kind of shudder, and shatters itself into little bits, nothing being left but the central disc and a heap of fragments! However, it does not appear to suffer any pain, or to lose any blood, and the five wounds on the disc very quickly heal. Then after a few days five little buds begin to show themselves, which quickly grow into new rays, and in a few weeks’ time the brittle starfish is as perfect as ever!
So ready are these creatures to break themselves up, that it is most difficult to obtain a perfect brittle starfish for a museum.
Brittle starfishes are very active animals, and when they are alive their long slender rays are always wriggling and coiling and twisting about, hardly ever seeming to be still for a single moment. Indeed, one naturalist compares a brittle starfish to five very long and active centipedes stitched to a tiny pin-cushion!
There are several different kinds of these very curious animals, most of which live at some little distance below low-water mark, and are hardly ever caught except by means of the dredge. But sometimes you may find one of them lying on the sand at the bottom of a pool among the rocks.