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Starlet Sea Anemone — printable fact sheet
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Starlet Sea Anemone
Nematostella vectensis
The starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) is a small, pale, burrowing anemone of brackish coastal lagoons and salt marshes in North America and Europe, and it is one of the most important animals in modern evolutionary biology. When its genome was published in 2007 the re…
Did you know?
- Despite its tiny size, the Starlet Sea Anemone has become a crucial model organism for studying the evolution of animal development and regeneration.
- Its genome turned out to be more similar in structure to a human's than a fruit fly's is, overturning assumptions about how simple the ancestor of animals was. It has no shell, no stinging reputation and no beauty, and yet it is arguably the most scientifically important sea anemone in the world. It can be cut into pieces and each piece will rebuild a whole animal. Although anemones look radially symmetric, Nematostella's internal anatomy has a distinct left and right.
What I learned
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