sacremon
New member
"Oh, I see the radiata is out" said my wife. She had just walked in the door, coming home from work, and had looked to the far end of the room where my aquarium is. This kinda caught me off-balance. I had gotten an Astropyga radiata in earlier yesterday, and it was sitting roughly where I had placed it, high on the right side of the tank on a large, flat rock. I know I had mentioned to her that I was getting in an urchin, but even if I had mentioned the name, I certainly didn't expect her to have remembered it. "It's where I placed it" I said. It was her turn to be confused "Huh?".
Then I realized where the confusion was coming from. The spines on the Astropyga radiata are not spread uniformly over the test (that is what the shell of an urchin is called). In particular, the ones on the top of the urchin are bunched into planes of spines. The way the urchin was sitting, we were seeing several of the planes from the edge. The angle of the planes of spines made it resemble a small lion, perched on the rock. A lion about the size of my Pterois radiata. Seeing as this rock is about a foot below a 150W MH bulb, there is no way the P. radiata would be there. He likes to be in a cave network I have set up on the left side of the tank during the day, coming out a little into the light at feeding time. But my wife thought it was the lion, and used the species portion of the name to identify it, which just happened to match the species name of the urchin. This is one of those rare occasions when using a common name would have made things less confusing.
Then I realized where the confusion was coming from. The spines on the Astropyga radiata are not spread uniformly over the test (that is what the shell of an urchin is called). In particular, the ones on the top of the urchin are bunched into planes of spines. The way the urchin was sitting, we were seeing several of the planes from the edge. The angle of the planes of spines made it resemble a small lion, perched on the rock. A lion about the size of my Pterois radiata. Seeing as this rock is about a foot below a 150W MH bulb, there is no way the P. radiata would be there. He likes to be in a cave network I have set up on the left side of the tank during the day, coming out a little into the light at feeding time. But my wife thought it was the lion, and used the species portion of the name to identify it, which just happened to match the species name of the urchin. This is one of those rare occasions when using a common name would have made things less confusing.
