Distribution
About 1,600 living species of starfish are known. Echinoderms maintain a delicate internal electrolyte balance in their bodies and this is only possible in a marine environment. This means that starfish occur in all of the Earth's oceans but are not found in any freshwater habitats. The greatest variety of species is found in the tropical Indo-Pacific. Other areas known for their great diversity include the tropical-temperate regions around Australia, the tropical East Pacific and the cold-temperate water of the North Pacific (California to Alaska). All starfish live on the sea bed but their larvae are planktonic, which allows them to disperse to new locations. Habitats range from tropical coral reefs, rocks, shell brash, gravel, mud and sand to kelp forests, seagrass meadows and the deep-sea floor.
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Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)