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Urchin

Purple heart urchin

Spatangus purpureus

Spatangus purpureus O.F. Müller, 1776 · Spatangidae WoRMS 124418

Reference photos

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A large, broad, low heart urchin of deep violet colour, up to 12 cm long, with short silky purple spines and scattered long pale ones on top. It lies buried in coarse sand and gravel, and often shows itself only as a furrow ploughed just beneath the surface.

Depth

From the infralittoral fringe down to about 900 m

Size

Up to 12 cm long and 8 cm across

Habitat

Buried in coarse sand and gravel, including maerl, rarely mud, on wave-sheltered seabed

Behaviour

Burrows and crawls beneath the sediment, leaving furrows in the gravel where it has passed

Diet

I eat

  • Organic detritus, taken both from the surface of the sediment and from within it
  • Spatangid heart urchins feed omnivorously on phytodetritus, faunal detritus and bacterial mats
  • Organic fragments in the sediment, reached by pushing maerl nodules aside as it ploughs forward

Eats me

  • The large comb star Astropecten aranciacus, its principal predator
  • The helmet shell Galeodea echinophora, a sand-dwelling gastropod that bores through the test with its radula to reach the animal inside
  • Sea bream, which can break the test open and take the contents

Where you'd find it

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

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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