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Urchin

Sea potato

Echinocardium cordatum

Echinocardium cordatum (Pennant, 1777) · Loveniidae WoRMS 124392

Reference photos

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A heart-shaped urchin clothed in a dense felt of short yellowish spines that lie flat and sweep backwards, so it looks furred rather than spiky. It lives buried in a permanent burrow in sand or muddy sand, from a few centimetres down to about 20 cm, and is very rarely seen alive in the open. What washes up on sheltered sandy shores is the brittle, brownish test, its broad furrowed pore bands running down the sides in a star shape.

Depth

Lower shore and subtidal down to about 200 m, with records to 230 m

Size

Up to 9 cm long, usually about 4 to 6 cm

Habitat

Burrows in coarse or fine clean sand, muddy sand and sandy mud on sheltered coasts, from the lower shore out to the open seabed

Behaviour

Lives buried in a permanent mucus-lined burrow with a breathing shaft to the surface, and re-buries itself within 20 minutes if turned out

Diet

I eat

  • Detritus, the dead organic matter mixed through the sand it lives in
  • Sediment particles taken indiscriminately, both from the surface and from well below it
  • Detritus settling out onto the seabed, so how fast it grows depends on a steady supply arriving from above

Eats me

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in the Celtic Sea and the waters west of Ireland.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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