7 months ago
29
Their five jaws are arranged in a shape Aristotle described as a ‘lantern’ but should have called a ‘horrible beak’
Sea 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” killed the urchins’ main predator, sunflower sea stars.
Could they be eaten by us or by otters? They could not. They had entered a zombie state and contained very little uni, the rich meat inside the urchin’s shell. And they are prepared to stay that way: dormant, alone – until they spot any kelp sprout that dares to breed out of the dead land and eat it before another urchin can. They are method actors performing The Waste Land, and we are students in an English lesson late on a hot afternoon, trying not to fall asleep as we listen to the poet’s voice on the scratchy recording, a recording that sounds like it was made in a room full of urchins, faintly clicking their spines:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
