Flower urchin
Amazing fact
Flower urchins use tube feet and tiny pincers to grasp gravel and cover their bodies.
National Museum of Natural Science
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An illustration based on the real animal.
A little discovery to share.
Flower urchins use tube feet and tiny pincers to grasp gravel and cover their bodies.
THE REAL WORLD
The real Flower urchin
- Scientific name
- Toxopneustes pileolus
- Japanese name
- ラッパウニ
- Group
- Ocean animals
- Class
- Echinoidea
- Order
- Camarodonta
- Family
- Toxopneustidae
- Genus
- Toxopneustes
It lives in seas south of the Boso Peninsula and Sagami Bay, in places with coral reefs.
The surface of its shell is covered with trumpet-shaped pincers called pedicellariae.
How the Flower urchin lives
They live on heaps of coral fragments on the seabed. They mainly eat calcareous algae growing on coral fragments. Their waste is yellow and shaped like little balls. They gather to reproduce and shake off the rubble covering them.
National Museum of Natural ScienceNational Park Service of TaiwanBasic data
- Range
- Boso Peninsula and south of the southern coast of Honshu to Sagami Bay
Where the Flower urchin has been recorded
Records: GBIF.org (CC0 and CC BY 4.0 records, retrieved 2026-11-07). Map: Natural EarthSee the records on GBIF
Watch wild animals from a distance. Do not touch or feed them, and take care of the places where they live.
Names around the world
- 日本語
- ラッパウニ
- 简体中文
- 喇叭毒棘海胆
- 繁體中文
- 喇叭毒棘海膽
- 한국어
- 주발성게
- Français
- Oursin-fleur
- Português (Brasil)
- Ouriço-flor-do-Indo-Pacífico
- Italiano
- Riccio fiore
- ไทย
- เม่นดอกไม้
Names come from Wikidata and iNaturalist records. Where a language has no recorded name, we use the scientific name.
Sources and how we check
- 鳥羽水族館 — ラッパウニChecked: 2026-11-04
- National Museum of Natural Science — 09 Toxopneustes pileolus (Lamarck, 1816)Checked: 2026-11-07
- National Park Service of Taiwan — The Flower Urchin-Checked: 2026-11-07
We check each fact against its source. The illustrations simplify how the real animal looks.
The classification (class, order, family, genus) follows Wikidata records, checked against GBIF. Classifications can change as research goes on.
The basic data are the values given in each source. They vary with how the animal is measured, whether it is male or female, and whether it lives in the wild or in captivity.
This page was translated from the original Japanese with the help of AI.
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