Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly

podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray,

and Anna Tashinsky.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones

with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in

no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is

Andy my fact is that for years scientists thought starfish had no heads. It now turns out they have no bodies.

Wow. All head. Are even the arms heads?

No.

Yeah, I think what this shows is that it's actually quite hard to describe Starfish in terms of human anatomy.

And it's like... So what's the difference between head and body according to this

definition okay this is the result of a new study from Stanford University and I think

maybe one or two other places and it's it's about the genetic code that sort of programs

Starfish because Starfish are really weird bodily as in they start out

with bilateral symmetry which is what humans have, as then you've got two sides,

you've got left and right, and it's sort of the same, you know, you're mirrored.

So Starfish start out like that when they're first born and then they kind of grow out of it and they become the

starfish shape that we know. And so what the study is it looked at the

genetic code which kind of programs head-like territory and it turns out that they have that in each of their arms and so

then and the middle the middle bit which joins all the arms together has more head-like genetics.

...