Starfish in military history. Three ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name "HMS Starfish": an A-class destroyer launched in 1894; an R-class destroyer launched in 1916; and an S-class submarine launched in 1933 and lost in 1940. In the World War II, Starfish sites were large-scale night-time decoys created during The Blitz to simulate burning British cities. Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States on 9 July 1962. Starfish Starfish or sea stars are star-shaped echinoderms belonging to the class Asteroidea. Common usage frequently finds these names being also applied to ophiuroids, which are
Phylum group. Furthermore, organisms in the stem group of a phylum can possess the "body plan" of the phylum without all the characteristics necessary to fall within it. This weakens the idea that each of the phyla represents a distinct body plan. A classification using this definition may be strongly affected by the chance survival of rare groups, which can make a phylum much more diverse than it would be otherwise. Total numbers are estimates; figures from different authors vary wildly, not least because some are based on described species, some on extrapolations to numbers of undescribed species. For instance, around