How many eyes does a starfish have?

While it may not look like starfish have eyes, they do, although they're not like our eyes. A starfish has eyespots that cannot see much in the way of details but can detect light and dark. These eyespots are at the tip of each of the starfish's arms. That means that a 5-armed starfish has five eyespots, and a 40-armed starfish has 40!

A starfish's eyespots lie underneath its skin, but you can see them. If you get a chance to gently hold a starfish, often it will tilt the end of its arms upward. Look at the very tip, and you might see a black or red dot. That's the eyespot.

Cartoons that portray starfish with a face with eyes in the center of their body are therefore inaccurate. A starfish is actually looking at you with its arms, not from the center of its body. It's just easier for cartoonists to portray them that way.

The eye of a sea star is very small. On a blue star, they are only about half a millimeter wide. They have a groove on the underside of each arm that has the tube feet that stars use to move. The eye is made of a couple hundred light-collecting units and is located at the end of one of the tube feet on each arm. It is a compound eye like that of an insect, but it doesn't have a lens to focus the light. This reduces its ability to see anything but light, dark, and large structures such as the coral reef it needs to live on.