Feeding Habits
The animals have a mouth with special jaws (Aristotle's lantern) located on the bottom (oral) surface. Their preferred diet is seaweeds, kelp and algae, which they scrape off and tear up from the sea floor. During larval development, urchins use bands of cilia to capture food from the water column.
Read more about this topic: Red Sea Urchin
Famous quotes containing the words feeding and/or habits:
“The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skins and furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)