Fashionable Sea Urchins

I might be in trouble when sea urchins are more fashionable than me.

Have you seen this story about the sea urchins who like to wear hats?

Well, it started out that they liked to wear rocks and shells on their heads to protect them from predators and the sun.

But then some staff at an aquarium got the idea to 3D-print some hats for them and turns out the sea urchins love them.

Now these creatures are sporting hats, all kinds of hats depending on their mood and occasion.  Feeling formal?  Wear the top hat.  In a country kind of mood? Go for the cowboy hat.  Want to feel strong and mighty? A Viking hat will do the trick.  In the mood for oh je nais se quois? Un beret, bien sûr.

We humans love to impose ourselves on the natural order do we not? Not enough to let the sea urchins just do their usual thing, we have to get involved and up their game.

Who knows what evolutionary impacts this interference will have on generations of sea urchins down the road? Who knows what possible havoc it might reap when, after being accustomed to tres chic hats, they find they can never go back to rocks.  There could be needless sea urchin deaths down the evolutionary road should the sea urchins find themselves without any cute 3D-printed hats to wear and they find that they simply can’t go back to wearing rocks.  Oh the shame! It’s like flying first class.  You can never go back to coach.

Are these hats cute and adorable? Yes.  And do these sea urchins look cute and adorable wearing them? Yes.  I cannot deny it.  But are those reasons enough to play with the natural order of things? Hmmm….

To be fair, I am also not one of those people who puts clothes on their dogs.  I am at least consistent.

The closest I have come to putting clothes on our dogs are a rain coat for Daisy, because she hates the rain, and a coat/wrap thing for the winter because both dogs need the warmth on very cold days outside on their walks.

But you can tell that they suffer what they clearly think is an indignity.  They do not enjoy wearing those coats at all.

And forget about dressing them up for Halloween.  Ernie came home with some costumes for them a few years ago, much to my chagrin.   Winnie got the spider costume and Daisy was a Mexican señorita.  It lasted all of two minutes.  They looked at me like, ‘What is happening? Can you make it stop?’ Yes, girls, I can.  Off came the costumes and they were placed in a Rubber Maid bin marked Halloween, where they sit to this day never to be worn again.  No anthropomorphizing in this household! Lol.

But, back to the fashionable sea urchins. 

I am looking at hats as a fashion accessory in a whole new light.  Usually, my hat wearing is limited to an Eagles beanie I wear when it is cold out, and a Phillies baseball hat in the summer when I need some shade. 

(Of course after the Awful Double Header of Defeat on Thursday night with the Phillies loss in the NLDS series and the Eagles loss to the NY Giants (yes, the stinky 1-4, now 2-4 NY Giants), I might keep them in a Rubber Maid container marked Losers until such time as they become Winners again.)

But I digress.

Now that we all have to compete with chic sea urchins, I can see I am going to need to up my hat game.

Maybe a nice raspberry beret to start.  The kind you find in a second-hand store.