Even moderate heat waves depress sea urchin reproduction along the Pacific coast

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By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. 


Excerpt: Sea urchins are a key but often destructive part of the kelp forest ecosystem along the Pacific Coast, and in boom years can often turn these forests into barrens devoid of marine life. But it remains a mystery what causes urchin boom and bust cycles and how sea urchins are affected by increasingly common marine heat waves. A new study by marine biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, now suggests that sea urchin populations along the Pacific Coast are more susceptible to heat waves than once thought, because the animals ramp down reproduction at temperatures substantially below levels that kill them. ...The study, published last week in the journal Communications Biology, a Nature journal, was conducted in cooperation with the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, and UC Davis’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in California.... 


Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/14/even-moderate-heat-waves-depress-sea-urchin-reproduction-along-the-pacific-coast/. 

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