Long Spine Urchin....Color Mutation??

[xxxmisfitkidxxx]

I'll try over here, because of the larger audience...but I have posted this on Michigan Reefers, MOFIB, and The Reef Stewardship Foundation with no answers....

I'm not joking.... This was a diadema urchin.... remember me telling you about him losing all of his spines????? This is some crazy @#$%!!!!!

I am going to get flamed, because some people won't even believe this.... but I bought two diadema urchins off Mucho Reef... I decided shortly after that two was one two many and traded one to a kid out in Midland...MandarinMan13....

These urchins were both HUGE... We are talking BASKETBALL SIZE.
I kept the smaller of the two, and about 4-5 months later, it's spines were slowly falling off....It looked as if it were dying. I increased water changes.. Invested in a better skimmer, used a better salt, changed my RO/DI filters, tested for anything and everything and could not come up with a logical reason why my big fat hungry urchin was losing his spines...So I gave up, I was going to find a replacement, a smaller urchin because I have been really interested in breeding the Banggai Cardinals, which I am currently experimenting with, semi-sucessfully...

So a week ago Monday, I found a small Long-Spine Urchin... The exact same urchin that I originally had got from Mucho, only a smaller version. I picked it up for a meer $25.... I was anxious to get back home an introduce him to my big fat daddy Banggai...and his mouth full of babies.


My spineless LS urchin was on the left end of my six foot 100 gallon display tank, so after a 2 hour drip acclimation I let the new and improved smaller Spiney version of what a Diadema Urchin is supposed to look like go on the right end of the tank. By morning, it was cuddled up next to my other urchin.... This new guy made a B-Line straight for my original urchin. I thought that this was very odd...But, in my tank I get huge stomatella snail spawns that almost cloud the water...ewww. I SWEAR that I have hermit crab larvae in a cryptic zone that is in my refugium, and everyone is pretty much getting it on... I have an abundance of what ever critter you can think of... spaghetti worms, chitons, bristle worms...actually a ton of different worms...After seeing that bobbit worm post a few days ago, I know I have a small type of worm like that, actually a few... Maybe not a bobbit, but something...Not to motion amphipods, copepods, and some other kinds of small shrimps or pods.

Back to the urchin... here goes nothin, everyone knows what a long spine urchin looks like...I know they come in different flavors, lol... What I mean is I've seen a few with white vertical white lines across some of the spines, white dots on the body, blue dots on the body... but they are almost always black.... Mine had a hint of purple to him, but this was on the urchins longest spines, and they were more black than anything...

Now, today, my urchin, looks like this....and it's freaking me out, because it is so awesome.....it turned into a completely different thing....like a moth turns into a butterfly.....and I can not find anything...I mean anything about it on the net.... So, someone pinch me and tell me I'm dreaming, but isn't this thing cool....

(I need someone to come take some pics of this guy for me, please.....)


Some smart guy needs to chime in and tell me that this is common, and this happens to everyone...because I feel special right now.

Do you see that Burgundy? OMG, it's so much more vibrant in real life...
It looks like a creature from a Tim Burton film, Like a Black suede body with Burgundy spikes delicately sewn in....

Let me know what you think about it.

 

[xxxmisfitkidxxx]

This is him, pre-spine loss...

He had lost his spines...oh...it's been months....I wanted to get rid of him in case he is fouling the water....because I thought he was dying,,,but I don't think that is the case. He had slowed down a bit during the "falling of the spines"... but picked back up and is more active than ever.....and has been this way for months...I've been waiting to pull a dead urchin test out for a while....but I don't think this is going to happen.

I'm not an expert either...but I have read a lot about urchins... What else do have to do when your unemployed and have nothing better than to sit around and watch your urchins' spines falling out....

Most people say once their spines fall out, they are on their way out the door....But a few others claim that the spines actually grew back...and the urchin lived healthy as it did one day one....


I have never heard anything about a color change like this...and that is what I am excited about....There are only so many search terms I can think of to pull a document that would be related to this...and so far nothing. I'm just looking for some input from somone who knows urchins, or has ever seen an urchin that looks anything like this....

My new urchin looks great, just as this one did in the begining

 

[xxxmisfitkidxxx]

And supposedly, spine loss is an indication of poor water quality....

Sorry, not here. It's crystal, undetectable, and everything is thriving...

My acro's are growing so fast it's unreal....My zoos are multiplying like crazy, and my mushrooms...well, they just mush....they don't grow that much, or split, but my nem does....it splits all the time, and it's annoying me.

 

[xxxmisfitkidxxx]

Oh trust me...The tank ain't spotless....there is plenty for him to eat, but he perfers coraline....I've tried three types of dried seaweed...and this was when he had spines also.. When I had my Hippo tang, I fed a half of a sheet of Nori a day..

I do have a lot of red Macro algea growing in the tank and refugium...but I have a little patch of hair algea.. a few bryopsis covered frags(thanks for that!)

I mentioned I got a new urchin...here is some pics of the new one, which is absolutly identical to what this crazy one used to look like. Taken with same camera with flash

 

[xxxmisfitkidxxx]

Well, I copied and pasted all that, minus replies...but I hope you can make sense of the wording...

The last set of pics is my new urchin, and is for refrence,,,same camera, shot with flash.

 

[skanderson]

its not from a mutation. the change in spine coloration is most likely due to some change in the water as compared to the water he origenally grew his spines in.