Wildlife
The purple sea urchin lives in kelp forests. It will eat any sort of algae, but kelp is its favourite food. These urchins are considered to be a delicacy in Japan.
Scientific name: Strongylocentrotus purpuratus
Rank: Species
California purple sea urchin
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Sea urchin barrens
New timelapse techniques capture the frenzied life of California's star gardens.
Using a flash strobe system linked to an in-built timer mechanism on his digital stills camera, cameraman Peter Kragh filmed timelapse in the wild for the first time. Previously, such sequences have been filmed in tanks. To the naked eye, these invertebrates seem inanimate, but at ultra-high speed their frenetic activity is revealed.
The following habitats are found across the Purple sea urchin distribution range. Find out more about these environments, what it takes to live there and what else inhabits them.
Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.
Additional data source: Animal Diversity Web
The purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, lives along the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean extending from Ensenada, Mexico to British Columbia, Canada. This sea urchin species is deep purple in color and lives in lower intertidal and nearshore subtidal communities. Along with sea otters and abalones, it is a prominent member of the spectacular kelp forest community. It normally grows to a diameter of about 4 inches and it may live as long as 70 years.
The purple sea urchin plays many roles. Besides its ecological importance, it is also an important fishery along the west coast of the US and it is one of several biomedical research models in cell and developmental biology.
Because of its importance to biomedical research, the sea urchin genome was completely sequenced and annotated in 2006. The sea urchin genome is estimated to encode about 23,300 genes. Many of these genes were previously thought to be vertebrate innovations or were only known from groups outside the deuterostomes. Thus the sea urchin genome provides a comparison to our own and those of other deuterostomes, the larger group to which both echinoderms and humans belong. Using the strictest measure, the purple sea urchin and humans share 7,700 genes. Many of these genes are involved in sensing the environment, a fact surprising for an animal lacking a head structure.
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Predation defence
Tactile sense
Metamorphosis
Egg layer
Spawning