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Urchin

Edible sea urchin

Echinus esculentus

Echinus esculentus Linnaeus, 1758 · Echinidae WoRMS 124287

Reference photos

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A large globular urchin, up to 15 to 16 cm across, its pinkish-red test closely covered in even reddish spines with violet tips. It creeps over bedrock and boulders from the sublittoral fringe to about 40 m, grazing algae and encrusting animals; where numbers are high its grazing can destroy kelp forests. The roe is edible.

Depth

Low water to about 40 m, though it may be found at 100 m or more

Size

Up to 15 to 16 cm in diameter, largest recorded 17.6 cm; about 9 to 11 cm at four years old

Habitat

Rocky reefs, on bedrock, boulders and in crevices and rockpools, from the sublittoral fringe downwards

Behaviour

A solitary, creeping omnivore that grazes and scavenges over the rock; heavy grazing can destroy kelp forests

Diet

I eat

  • Seaweeds grazed off the rock, with kelps such as Laminaria a preferred food
  • Encrusting animals scraped off the rock, including barnacles, hydroids, bryozoans and sea squirts
  • Worms, bottom material and detritus, taken as an omnivorous grazer and scavenger

Eats me

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in 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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