Their five jaws are arranged in a shape Aristotle described as a ‘lantern’ but should have called a ‘horrible beak’
ea urchins are as sinister as they appear. Ten years ago, in California’s vast, wavy kelp, sea urchins started to eat and breed, and eat and breed, and over seven years destroyed most of the underwater forests. Then they settled on the floor of their wasteland, forming spiny purple carpets, clicking urchin barrens along 150km of coastline. A major marine heatwave had damaged the kelp and a “sea star wasting syndrome”Could they be eaten by us or by otters? They could not.
A baby sea urchin resembles a virus. The urchin shape grows within and when it is time, it turns itself inside out – “like a sock”, a PBS documentary describes it, before letting you know that urchins can live for centuries and areBut not knowing any of this, we still somehow feel when in their presence that they are worse than the spikes. That there is a reason the name “sea hedgehogs” didn’t stick. That they are powerful. That they have a darkness.
I first knew sea urchins by their shells and did not realise for years that the beautiful green and the beautiful shape of the objects on my grandmother’s mantlepiece were the same things that made my heart beat slightly faster in the sea. Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
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