granulatedseastar

It’s hard being an adult sometimes. Once you become a grown-up, the world starts expecting you to possess a certain level of maturity, which includes things like powering through your Aunt Virginia’s special turnip casserole without gagging, not engaging your Uncle Ted about his uninformed political views on Facebook, or trying not to turn everything you see or hear into something sexually suggestive.

But there are some situations where the lattermost just can’t be avoided. Like when Japanese Twitter user Kojiro decided to take a trip to his local aquarium and came across this curious-looking starfish that, no matter how you look at it, looks like a certain part of the male anatomy. Well, to some dirty-minded folk anyway…

According to Kojiro (@cojilo), he snapped the picture of the starfish and display sign below an outing to the Shinagawa Aquarium in Tokyo.

▼ “So I visited the aquarium today…”

https://twitter.com/cojilo/status/622751973096296448

A translation of the sign reads as follows:

“When we found this starfish, we were left with no comment.
Granulated Sea Star

This is one kind of starfish. People all over the world can’t help but say it looks like this or that, but those of us here can’t bring ourselves to touch it and find out. So we’ll just leave you with this bland comment: Wouldn’t it be fun if they made a stuffed animal of it!”

But while the Shingawa Aquarium was hesitant to make any official comment on it, Twitter users weren’t feeling as shy at all. Here are some of the more PG-rated comments the tweet has garnered:

“Oh, could it be a thumb?”
“It doesn’t look like my thumb!! lol”
“That’s hilarious! haha”
“I wish we could change its name!”
“It looks pretty perverted loll”
“It’s totally ~ Pe x n x is!”
“I guess I’ll have to compare it with my own ╰⋃╯”

And from one user that is clearly better at this adulting thing than the rest of us:

“Shouldn’t we try to refrain from this kind of behavior a little more?”

In case you were wondering, although granulated sea stars may slightly differ in color, they all retain their questionably phallic shape. The species can generally be found in tropical waters, such as the Great Barrier Reef, or if you can’t quite make it to that part of the world, at the Shinagawa Aquarium.

Source: Twitter (@cojilo)
Top image/insert image: Twitter (@cojilo), edited by RocketNews24