A man is walking his dog along the beach. It’s very early in the morning — still a little dark — and it seems there is nobody else around.

However, as he and his canine companion walk onward, the man spots a lone figure up ahead, whose movements are kind of strange.

As he gets closer, he sees it’s a young woman. She’s picking things up off of the sand and flinging them into the sea.

Overwhelmed by curiosity, he decides to go up to her, say hello, and hopefully find out what she’s up to.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I’m sorry to intrude, but…what are you doing?” he asks.

“Oh,” she laughs, “Sure. Well, on days like this when tide is so low a lot of starfish get washed up on and ‘stranded’ on the beach. Then when the sun comes out, they dry up and die. So I try and get here early and save as many as possible.”

The man absorbs the information, then looks from one end of the beach down to the other. He exclaims, “But this beach is so wide and long! And I can see now there are so many starfish that have washed up on the sand. There’s no way you can cover the whole area, right? I mean, what’s the point?”

The young woman also scans the beach, and then looks down at her right hand, in which she clutches a dark red starfish. She looks up at the man, smiles, and says,

“What’s the point? Well, the point is that it makes a difference to this one.”

She then swings her arm back and tosses the creature far out into the water.