Unused Starfish Facts

I wrote a short story a few days ago, about a girl throwing starfish in the ocean, which I’m going to post in full here, then tell you about some starfish facts that didn’t make it into the story.

Thousands of starfish had washed up on the beach, and a little girl was diligently throwing them back into the water, one at a time.

A man came up to the girl and said, “You’ll never save all of them. What you’re doing is pointless. It doesn’t matter.”

The girl threw another starfish into the water. “It mattered to that one.”

The man snorted and walked away.

The girl kept throwing starfish, one after another.

To throw one starfish back into the ocean takes a trivial amount of effort, but to throw ten, or fifty, is much less so. The girl had not learned much of biomechanics, but she began to feel the strain in her back. Her skin had softened from the seawater, and the starfish themselves were abrasive. Her fingers had pruned. Her shoulder hurt. She was cut, twice, on her fingers, as the same storm that had stranded the starfish had also brought up broken shells and crab carapaces. The skin of a starfish was like sandpaper.

She tried switching hands, and could throw the starfish less well, and it wasn’t long before she had mirrored all her injuries. She was bleeding, though the blood wept rather than flowing, briefly staining the starfish pink before they were tossed into the ocean.

It seemed as though there were just as many dying starfish as when she’d started.

After three hours, the girl was sunburnt. A passing man had told her that she should stop what she was doing, and had offered her some water, which she took, but he hadn’t helped to throw the starfish back.

The girl’s hands were cracked, scraped, and raw. Saltwater found the wounds, but she’d gone numb, and her motions became more mechanical.

“It mattered to that one,” she thought to herself, “It mattered to that one,” over and over, like a mantra. Her muscles ached, but the ache became familiar. When she’d started, her throws had been beautiful things, guided by purpose, but now they were sloppy and threatened to pull her off balance.

She did fall, more than once, landing on sand that was filled with jagged debris, and sometimes she was slow to get up. But she did get up, because there were more starfish to save, tens of thousands of them.

Night fell, and it was harder to see the starfish, but they were still in need of help. She was tired, and the cuts on her fingers had multiplied. The skin had been wet for too long, and in one place, on her palm, where she had gripped a thousand starfish to throw them, a piece of white skin had come off.

Still, she kept throwing starfish.

Her mother didn’t find her until after midnight.

“Hi mom,” said the girl. Her voice croaked. She had been saying, “It mattered to that one” under her breath for long enough that her vocal cords had strained. She threw another starfish into the ocean.

“You need to come home,” her mother said.

“These starfish will die without me,” said the girl.

“I know,” said her mother. “But you need to come home, because if you keep doing this, you’ll collapse on the beach, and like a starfish, you’ll need to be rescued too.”

The girl stooped down, back aching, and picked up another starfish. Many of them had died by this point, but there were still uncountably many that lived. The rough skin of the starfish grated at her tender skin, but she rose and threw it, arm protesting, and watched it fall down into the water.

Her mother grabbed her gently by the shoulders. “I’m bringing you home,” she said. “It would be better if I didn’t have to carry you, but I will if I have to.”

“I don’t want to be the sort of person who leaves starfish to die,” said the girl, shrugging off her mother. But a part of her did want to be carried, because she’d walked for miles along this beach, one stooping step at a time.

“I know,” said her mother. “But to survive, you have to be. Save as many as you can, but take breaks, get good sleep, eat well. Then go back and save more.”

The girl swayed where she was. She was close to passing out, though maybe it was because her rhythm had been interrupted.

Her mother held out a hand, so they could walk together, like they’d done when she was smaller.

And it was then that she noticed the scars on her mother’s hands, the calluses and rough spots, the places where cuts had healed. She had seen her mother’s hands many times before, but had never asked why they were that way.

The girl slipped her hand into her mother’s and began to cry as they walked back home.

I’m relatively happy with this, hence giving you a chance to read it, but I spent some time in research mode, and there were things that just didn’t have a chance to make it into the story proper.

Why Do Starfish Strandings Happen?

I live in the Midwest, and have only rarely visited the oceans. I’d heard the starfish parable a lot, and sort of thought this was a regular occurrence, that you could just go to a beach and see a bunch of starfish dying there. When I first saw a beach, I was surprised that it was mostly just sand, and this has been more or less what it’s like for the various beaches I’ve visited around the world. I have yet to see a starfish in the wild, let alone save one.

Turns out that starfish strandings are relatively rare, happening every few years. What happens is, starfish cling to the bottom of the ocean floor, and really bad weather is enough to rip them up, with the heavy waves pushing them up onto the beach, far enough that they can’t get back. This is more common when there’s some sort of stressor, like water that’s too warm, a hypoxic event, or disease, but mostly it’s the weather that brings starfish by the thousands onto the beach.

The nature of the starfish parable gets changed by this. The mass stranding is a local, concentrated, acute event, much more akin to a natural disaster than an ongoing crisis. The callous bystander who stands by watching the girl (and in some versions, joins in when she says “it mattered to that one) isn’t a huge, ongoing problem. Instead, he’s saying, “well, that sucks, but how does a person even deal with a sudden, outside context event of this scale?” While strandings happen every year, the mass events happen more rarely.

Although, all that said … mass strandings appear to be increasing in recent years. It’s likely tied to climate change, whether that’s warm waters or stronger storms. The strandings happen because of extremes, and if those extremes are more common, more starfish die. The parable dates to 1969¹, and is not an environmental polemic, but as time passes it sort of becomes one, simply because this is something that drives mass strandings.

If the parable is read as environmental polemic, it works less well, because throwing the starfish back addresses a symptom, not the root cause. There’s probably a somewhat cynical version of the parable where the little girl is scoffed at for not understanding the systemic effects that drive starfish strandings in the first place.

Starballing

There’s an interesting thing that starfish do, which is to curl up their arms into a ball and ride the tidal currents by rolling across the seafloor. This wasn’t discovered until 2013, maybe because it only happens in inclement weather and beneath the surface of the water.

This is one of the only pictures of starballing starfish, somehow.

This behavior probably contributes to stranding, maybe significantly. The starfish do their starballing to survive the storms, or to move to better feeding grounds, or to escape a hostile environment, but in certain circumstances this rolling them up onto the beach where they can’t escape.

Does this give the parable a different texture? I guess my view of starfish had always been as essentially passive things, like trees, at the mercy of their surroundings. And this is still true, the starfish is a simple thing. But they’ve been known to raise a limb and test the currents, and to starball as a response to their conditions. It’s probably anthropomorphizing a starfish too much to say that the ones stranded on the beach made a grave mistake, but it’s not that much of a stretch. Is it different, to save a helpless creature, when that helpless creature is responsible for the predicament it’s in? I don’t really know.

Starfish Skin

A starfish is covered with something called ossicles, little pieces of calcium carbonate, which give it a rough or spiny texture. I’ve touched starfish before, though only at aquariums, and they have a texture that ranges from sandpaper to tiny pebbles. Throwing a starfish does seem like it would be pretty rough on the hands.

Starfish are carnivores or scavengers, and because they move slowly, they’re adapted to eat things that move even slower than they do. This means mussels, clams, barnacles, coral polyps, and a bunch of other things. Things more helpless than they are, in fact. So if you throw a starfish back into the ocean, and it survives, it’s going to go on to kill other creatures that are even less capable.

What are you maximizing, starfish throwing girl? For the lives of starfish? Do you believe it’s fine to kill a bivalve, as they feel no pain? Are you a bivalvegan? Starfish are in a weird middle ground, closer to a bivalve than a crustacean, and barnacles are crustaceans with proper nervous systems. So if you’re doing the moral calculus on throwing a starfish back in the ocean, when it would otherwise have died … I don’t know that there’s a framework where the math works out, at least from a utilitarian or consequentialist perspective. Probably there are moral frameworks where you have to save starfish, I don’t know.

Unfortunate Facts

I read all these things and didn’t include any of them. There’s a way in which driving at a point means ignoring nuance, in looking at complications and alternative readings, then deciding that they’re not a part of what you’re doing. I could feel this pull to dunk on my own expanded parable, to undercut with a wryly placed fact, to digress into some direction I found interesting but didn’t serve the story in any real way.

I’m the sort of person who likes research and learning about things, and there are ways that it gets in the way of the writing process sometimes, as the rough edges surface and need to be sanded down in a way that doesn’t cause the piece to lose its fundamental function, or betray the complex reality of the world.

I could have written a longer and worse version of the story with more facts in it, a sprawling thing that looked at what a starfish is and how it fits into the ecosystem. I definitely could have undercut the expanded parable in a bunch of different ways. So I’m glad I wrote the story as I wrote it.

But there’s a part of me that sees it as a shadow of the real world, simple, flat, and uncomplicated, worse for its purity and simplicity.

1. It’s actually a 26-page essay and meditation by Loren Eiseley, “The Star Thrower”. The popular parable is a very loose adaptation and much shorter. They’re both in favor of individual action even in the face of futility though.