Tuesday November 10, 2026
Monterey Herald —
Sea urchins scurried – well, if you can call moving a few inches a minute “scurrying” – away from lab-grown sunflower stars that were placed in cages on the Monterey Bay ocean floor by Sunflower Star Laboratory recently.
This research project’s purpose was to temporarily put these sunflower stars back into the ecosystem where they are critically endangered to see how other marine species responded. It turns out the sunflower star presence alone is enough to scare sea urchins into hiding. Over the course of a month, the sea urchins surrounding the cage went from between 80-100 urchins to just two — an over 99% decrease within 3 feet of the sunflower star cages.
Reuven Bank was underwater watching this phenomenon. “Sea urchins that had never even considered the existence of a sunflower star before were running in fear just by the smell of one,” Bank said. “That shows how strong the millions of years of evolutionary history are that came flooding back onto the ocean reef as soon as some sunflower stars were temporarily introduced.”