Sea Urchins Excavate Pits For Themselves
Eureka Alerts reported, Sea Urchins Erode Rock Reefs . Look at them (above), so snugly, SO PURPLY, so the mauve of The Mauve Decade , one of the first synthetic dyes. It was invented in 1856 by Willam Henry Perkin (subject of a recent Google Doodle). "The researchers found that sea urchins did indeed visibly sculpt the rock, removing material from all the rock surfaces during the laboratory experiment. Rates of excavation varied greatly by rock type in the lab: while each urchin excavated around 32g of medium-grain sandstone over a year, meaning that an average-sized pit could be sculpted in under five years, granite excavation was 37 times slower, so arduous that it would take more than a century to form a pit. Field measurements reflected this difference, with granite pits being shallower, and sea urchins flatter, than their sandstone counterparts." That sentence, "rates of excavation varied greatly by rock type" is so infuriatingly relatab...
