AOS: все виды морских звезд. Разбор

Every Starfish Type Explained If you've ever seen a starfish clinging to a mussel-covered rock on the Pacific coast, there's a good chance it was this one. The ochre sea star, Pisaster ochraceus, is one of the most consequential animals in the history of ecology, not because of its size or its venom, but because of what happens when you remove it. In nineteen sixty-six, ecologist Robert Paine ran a now-legendary experiment on the rocky shores of Makah Bay in Washington state, manually removing every ochre sea star from a section of intertidal reef. Within months, mussels had carpeted the entire zone, crowding out anemones, barnacles, algae, and dozens of other species. The diversity of the habitat collapsed. Paine used this result to coin the term "keystone species," meaning a species whose impact on its ecosystem is vastly disproportionate to its abundance, and the ochre sea star became the textbook example.