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Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"Graze The Roof" — Purple and red sea urchins pick at their Pterygophora plate in an emerging urchin barren in Monterey Bay. Once the food is gone, urchins go into a zombie-like dormant stage waiting for their next meal. It is thought that urchins can stay in this starved state for several years. Sea otters will avoid them as a food source since they're littorally empty calories. Sunflower stars would likely still hunt them, but their absence since the starfish plague of 2013 has had rippling repercussions through the food web ever since. We don't know how frequent and longstanding urchin barrens were historically, but we know that the coast benefits greatly from the presence of kelp forests—and people are stepping in where ecological keystones have gone missing. How could people become better stewards of the kelp forest? June 2020, by Pat Webster @underwaterpat