The Harmless but Harmful Sea Urchins.

Billy the sea otter lived along California’s coast. His favorite food was sea urchins, yeah, those spiky purple things in the water. Billy found them everywhere he went. Billy didn’t have a lot of friends left to share the tasty sea urchins; sharks or killer whales had eaten most of his friends, or maybe a few had died because of age. Well, Billy usually found the delicious sea urchins near kelp. One day, Billy was going to play hide-and-seek with his friends Sally and Ben in a bed of kelp. He went to their usual hide-and-seek spot but couldn’t find it! Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something moving around.

Billy looked down and saw not just one but tons of sea urchins crawling across the ground, slowly devouring the kelp bed bit by bit. He muttered to himself, “Sea urchins are yummy but have destroyed my favorite playground. If we had some more otters, we could eat them all, so they couldn’t destroy our territory.”

After a few days, Billy barely saw any kelp left, and sea urchins ruined his whole life. There was no way the little sea otter population could eat all of these sea urchins. Billy thought to himself, “The only way to get rid of them is to let the humans help us,” so Billy set off to find some fishermen for help.

For a long time, he couldn’t find anybody until he found a scuba diver. Billy swam towards the scuba diver and grabbed her hand, quickly leading her to the sea urchins, who were still roaming around the almost disappeared kelp forest. Billy let go of the scuba diver’s hand and put his little palms together and shook them up and down, begging.

After a little while, the scuba diver didn’t seem to get what the sea otter was trying to say and swam to the surface and left. Billy was very disappointed. He was both sad and mad that the scuba diver swam away. But after a while, the scuba diver came back! She was holding a bucket and net. “Looks like she went to get supplies to help capture the sea urchins,” Billy said under his breath. He was so happy! After the scuba diver left, there were only a few sea urchins left, and they were for Billy to enjoy. From that day on, Billy never got into any problems with sea urchins.

Note: Endangered species and overpopulation can affect the food chain a lot.