Freyella elegans
Freyella elegans is a deep‑water starfish in the Freyellidae family that lives on the ocean floor in the northwestern Atlantic at abyssal depths, around 3,000 meters down.
Description: It has a small central disc and usually twelve long arms about 210 mm (8 inches) long. The top side has hexagonal plates with one to three spinelets, covered by a thin membrane and with no pedicellariae. The madreporite is near the edge of the disc and the anus is near the center. The arms are long and narrow near the disc, widen toward the middle, and taper to the tips; their membranes are semi-transparent with saddle-like bands and many tiny pedicellariae. The underside shows ambulacral grooves that take up more than half the width of each arm, and the outer spines around the mouth form a bar across these grooves.
Habitat and range: This is a bathydemersal species found in the northwestern Atlantic, from Cape Hatteras to Georges Bank, and also near Greenland, with some reports from the Gulf of Guinea.
Life and feeding: Very little is known about its feeding. Some related deep-sea starfish appear to feed while resting on the sediment rather than actively suspending particles from the water, and some Freyella individuals have been found with small crustacean remains in their mouths.
Collection notes: Deep-water animals are hard to collect and often damaged by dredging or trawling, making study difficult. In 1986, Maureen Downey showed that many names given to this group were actually synonyms of Freyella elegans, helping clarify the species identity.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:11 (CET).