There's a hungry Arctic predator with a lot of arms that eats dead polar bears
CTV
A new study by a national research group says starfish tie with polar bears as the top predators of the Arctic marine ecosystem.
On the Arctic sea floor lie hungry predators that can eat dead polar bears.
The voracious carnivores are seastars, better known as starfish, and a new study by a national research group says they tie with polar bears as the top predators of the Arctic marine ecosystem.
Co-author Remi Amiraux, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba, said sea floor, or benthic, organisms are not commonly studied because they are often assumed to be lower on the food chain.
But the study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the ocean floor includes organisms across the whole range of the food chain.
Seastars within the Pterasteridae family sat at the top, with the study dubbing them "the benthic equivalent to polar bears."
"It’s a shift in our view of how the coastal Arctic marine food web works," Amiraux said in an interview.
He said that invertebrates, or creatures without backbones, living in sediment on the Arctic sea floor did not just consist of plant-eating herbivores.
