Crown-of-thorns starfish substrates with their arms and, when offered a choice of substrates, tend to settle on coralline algae, which they will subsequently feed on. In the classic pattern for echinoderms, the bilaterally symmetrical larva is replaced by a pentamerously symmetrical stage at metamorphosis, with the latter's body axis bearing no relationship to that of the larva. Thus the newly metamorphosed starfish are five-armed and are 0.4–1 mm diameter. (Note the size of the tube feet relative to the size of the animal.) They feed on the thin coating layers of hard encrusting algae (coralline algae) on the undersides of dead coral
How the Snake Lost Its Legs enough rhetoric[al] punch. It is accessible to most readers with a light background in biology," though not as suitable for, "the [university] classroom as Held's "Quirks of Human Anatomy"." How the Snake Lost Its Legs How the Snake Lost Its Legs: Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo is a 2014 book on evolutionary developmental biology by Lewis I. Held, Jr. The title pays homage to Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories", but the "tales" are strictly scientific, explaining how a wide range of animal features evolved, in molecular detail. The book has been admired by other biologists as both accurate