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If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside!  –Tristan Tzara   The drug-addict, drunk, wife-shooter and writer William Burroughs used to tell a story about a man who teaches his anus to talk The orifice eventually takes over his life and kills him Wildlife can be as least as weird as the imagination of Burroughs Consider the Crown of Thorns starfish Instead of a head it has an anus on the top of its body, while its mouth – a round hole equipped with inward-pointing teeth at the centre of the radiating arms – is in the middle of its underside   This positioning is less unusual than you might think Having a mouth underneath and an anus on top is ideal if you want to eat crud on the seafloor, and this is how the ancestors of the Crown of Thorns started out Many of its distant cousins, among them starfish and sea cucumbers, still pursue that lifestyle (On the abyssal plains, the so-called desert of the deep sea floor, large herds of sea cucumbers are constantly grazing on the detritus that has fallen from above They are the night-soil men of the deep in a holothurian heaven) Unlike these animals, however, the Crown of Thorns is no longer a scavenger, having acquired a taste for living flesh Dressed in brilliant shades of purple, blue, orange red, white and grey and with anything from seven to twenty-three (but usually about fifteen) rays around a central dome, it bristles with poisonous spikes – a submarine version of Pinhead, the extradimensional being in the horror film Hellraiser   Many creatures in the garden of earthly delights that is a tropical coral reef have more charm than the Crown of Thorns (Pfeffer’s Flamboyant Cuttlefish, which turn itself startling hues of purple and pink at will while posturing like an actor in Noh theatre, is one of my favourites) But few are more compulsively unsettling than the Crown of Thorns, and few are as like us in their power to consume and destroy once they set to work   The claim