Sea urchins and other echinoderms are harvested globally for food and used in research, raising questions about their capacity for pain and welfare implications of current practices.
Echinoderm welfare is at the philosophical frontier of animal welfare science: the evidence for pain experience in sea urchins is very limited compared to cephalopods or fish. However, even accepting low probability of sentience, the scale of harvest — hundreds of millions of sea urchins annually — means that even small probability of morally relevant experience aggregates. The precautionary welfare principle suggests that methods that minimise any potential suffering should be preferred where practical alternatives exist.