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They lay in their thousands, covering the beach in a rug of pink and orange. Some were curled up, their spiny feet pointing towards the heaven. Others lay flat where they had been washed up by the tide. All were dead.

If the commonage noun for a normal group of starfish is a constellation, then this pitiful sight on the Kent coastline was more like a milky way.

Mass starfish strandings, or "wrecks", are not uncommon in Britain and typically happen once a yr.

But the scale of death visited upon the beaches of southern England in the past few weeks has stunned conservationists and prompted a major investigation into what could be killing then many marine animals.

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Carnage: Thousands of expressionless starfish at Sandwich Bay in Kent

Information technology had been assumed - hoped, even - that the deaths were the upshot of freak weather or unusual tides outside the control of people.

Some of the deaths undoubtedly were. But experts now believe the slaughter which has blighted Kent and Sussex is too the result of human being activity - more particularly, the intensive fishing for mussels.

Starfish are without doubt one of the great wonders of the marine world. "They are astonishing," says Prof Martin Attrill at Plymouth University, ane of U.k.'s leading starfish experts.

"They take incredible powers of regeneration. If y'all chop off an arm, it will abound back inside months and if you lot chop a starfish in half, it will grow dorsum into two.

"In the Thames estuary they were once regarded as pests, and fishermen used to endeavour to kill them past slicing them in one-half and throwing them dorsum. Only, of course, all they were doing was doubling the numbers."

Starfish are echinoderms, a family of vii,000 spiny marine creatures that includes ocean cucumbers and body of water urchins. There are thought to be at least 1,800 different types of starfish in the globe, only given that they thrive in deep, dark and inhospitable seabeds, the true number could be much higher.

Most species of starfish have five arms, just some accept many more than. The sun starfish - a behemothic animate being sometimes seen off the west coast of Britain - tin can have up to 24 arms and grow upwardly to 30in across.

The creatures plant on the beaches of Kent effectually Pegwell Bay and Sandwich Bay ii weeks ago, and on Brighton beach at the weekend, were all common starfish, Asterias rubens, creatures whose dried bodies are sold in souvenir shops.

Millions of common starfish alive in British seas. About the size of a hand, they are pinky orangish when alive, but turn a vivid orange when dry. And like all starfish, their bodies are a model of engineering ingenuity.

Take their movement. While most animals move using joints and muscles, starfish use the sort of hydraulics normally seen in a JCB digger.

Their bodies are riddled with a network of tubes which conduct sea water from a hole on their top side to hundreds of tiny feet which lie in rows along each arm.

These feet are hollow tubes which end in a sucker. Past pumping water in and out of these tubes, starfish can move each human foot independently, propelling themselves along the seabed.

And the artillery aren't simply for moving. The tip contains a primitive center that allows it to see light and night - and detect movement - while the tube feet remove oxygen from the water.

Starfish take their own version of the anti-fouling paint used on boats to deter parasites and predators. Their bodies are covered with small white objects known as pedicellariae, which forestall animals latching on to them.

If their movement is odd, then the mode they swallow is positively conflicting. Their mouths are underneath their bodies, making information technology difficult to get leverage on casualty.

To cope, they have developed the ingenious, if revolting, trick of "everting" their stomachs - turning them inside out every bit they push them through their mouths out of their body.

"They are very found of mussels," said Prof Attrill. "They clamp their tube feet around a mussel and pull the shell apart.

"And then they evert their breadbasket like turning a pocket within out, and push it into the shell to digest the mussel, and so suck all its juices.

"It's an easy way of taking in food because you don't have to deal with any beefy material."

Their platonic feeding ground is a mussel bed, where millions of starfish will besiege at whatsoever ane time. And it's hither where they are virtually at take a chance.

Violent storms tin send terrifically potent currents through the mussel beds where they are feeding, pluck them off their prey, carry them to the shore and dump thousands at a time onto a embankment.

Later on last calendar week's ferocious storms, hundreds of common starfish were institute done ashore at Black Rock in Brighton.

The Surround Agency, which has been chosen in to investigate the wrecks of the concluding few weeks, says the storms nigh certainly killed the Brighton starfish.

"Information technology'southward likely that the storms and high spring tides dislodged them from the mussel beds and pushed them on shore," said the agency's spokeswoman, Lucy Harding.

"Once out of the water, they die. But in Kent, thousands of starfish were washed aground long before the storms.

"We've been investigating what might have killed them and we've ruled out the weather condition. They were in a adept condition and were all done ashore at the same fourth dimension, which means nosotros can rule out disease."

The Environment Agency at present believes that dredgers - the kind used to scrape the sea floor for mussels - were almost certainly to blame.

The dredging may accept killed the starfish in two ways. It may accept dislodged them, and the currents carried them to the shore before they then had a chance to grip on whatever solid object. Or the dredging may accept thrown up mud and sand that covered the starfish, effectively suffocating them and killing thousands in one get.

Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, of the Marine Conservation Club, said the mass deaths are withal another example of the dangers of overfishing.

The society is lobbying the Regime to dramatically extend its protection of the seas when it publishes the long-awaited Marine Bill next month.

"Dredging is scraping the lesser of the sea and it causes huge collateral damage," he said.

"In Lyme Bay in Dorset, Chesil Beach is littered with ocean fans, a blazon of soft coral, that have been killed by dredging for scallops.

"This dredging should be going on where it doesn't impairment the seabed and the ecosystem - places where there'southward but mud, gravel and sand. They shouldn't be doing it where it causes and then much destruction.

"We desperately need to become more of our littoral waters protected. Currently just one per cent of British waters are protected - information technology should be 30per cent."

"Mutual starfish are not rare or endangered but it's not near whether species are rare. Information technology'southward nigh protecting the whole ecosystem."