Right now, I’m on a business trip. Thankfully, the hotel I’m staying in has a LAN, so I can get onto the SDMB.
I’m staying at a hotel near Ft. Myers, FL. When I checked in yesterday, I noticed that all the towels in my room had small (1.5") dried starfish laying on top of them. Initially, I thought they were sorta cute, so I swiped them and put them in the drawer in the nightstand.
This morning, I went to breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant and came back to my room soon afterward. The cleaning person had put out fresh towels, as well as - fresh starfish.
Upon closer examination, I found that these little starfish weren’t fake plastic replicas. They’re real. Dried out, but real.
It occurred to me that someone has to be supplying the hotel with the starfish. After all, I don’t know of any beach or other place where one can find several thousand dead starfish of uniform size. I’m no animal rights activist, but it would sorta freak me out that there’s a business out there that allows people to buy dead sea creatures in bulk. (If the hotel does this every time they put out fresh towels, I imagine they go through tens or hundreds of thousands of starfish a year.) I have a few questions:
Is buying dead starfish in bulk legal?
Do suppliers breed and grow them for this purpose?
Don’t animal rights activists object?
Does this creep anyone else out? Or is it just me?
I know that the last question is more of an IMHO question, but the first three seem suited to GQ, so can this post live in GQ for now?
If they’re Crown of Thorns starfish, you can take them all, live. No animal activists would mind that, given they’re singlehandedly (leggedly) destroying the Great Barrier Reef. Sadly, being nasty thorny bastards, no one is likely to go picking them up. I think they’re poisonous too.
When I was in 6th or 7th grade, I got to go to Ocean City with my aunt and uncle. We went down to the beach and I picked up about 50 of those little starfish off the beach and put them in my bucket (they were alive, of course. If you set them on a surface they would inch forward). But anyway, I left them in the bucket with some water on the balcony. The next day…
Starfish soup. For some reason they had all “melted” I guess, for lack of a better word. It didn’t smell so great, either. It was like a bucket of lumpy orange Jell-O.
It looks like you can buy starfish in bulk. At this site cost ranges from $0.69 to $2.49 per 100.
Apparently they are so plentiful that concern for them mostly centers on dealing with population explosions, which can include millions of individuals. As istara mentioned, the Crown of Thorns is being studied as a predator that destroys coral reefs.
This article discusses the effect that a large starfish population has had on the clam harvest in New Jersey, and efforts that have been made to reduce the number of starfish.
I don’t know if there is any specific animal rights movement to protect the starfish, but many animal rights websites use a story called The Starfish to illustrate the point that it doesn’t matter if there are thousands of representatives of a species, each individual is worth saving.
Personally, I don’t find dried starfish creepy, even if they are purchased in bulk.
Dried starfish - and a wide variety of other sea life related products, like scallop shells - are indeed sold in very large quantities. There are a variety of shell shops that cater to both tourists and shell collectors. Some are carefully documented (what species, where it was taken and how, etc.) for serious collectors, while ones sold for normal tourists usually aren’t so careful about keeping such information. Some shell shops throw biology to the winds and do things like take limpet shells (basically, a limpet is a kind of snail where the shell is a shallow, untwisted cone) and glue two such shells together like they’re clams, which often gets a laugh from people more familiar with those creatures. Particularly rare, but not endangered, shells (such as wentletraps) or unusually delicate and beautiful ones (such as murexes) can sell for anywhere from $20 up to several hundreds appiece, while common ones can sell for a few quarters each.
I think most of these shells are collected in the wild, like commercial fishing. Most of the creatures commonly collected for their shells are common enough that this isn’t a threat to the species. Usually if a particular kind of shellfish is endangered, they will have signs up and down the local beaches warning people not to take them.
On the Barrier Reef, they also have these amazingly cool (and harmless AFAIK) vivid blue starfish. You can even pick them up - gently - and if you hold them still they relax enough for their little tentacle things to start coming out. They’re quite big though, from 20cm across, maybe more.
then let us know what they said.