  It has been known for 30 years that 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles of charge Q
greater than one cannot be spherically symmetric. 5 years ago, Bolognesi
conjectured that, at some point in their moduli space, BPS monopoles can become
approximately spherically symmetric in the high Q limit. In this note we
determine the sense in which this conjecture is correct. We consider an SU(2)
gauge theory with an adjoint scalar field, and numerically find configurations
with Q units of magnetic charge and a mass which is roughly linear in Q, for
example in the case Q=81 we present a configuration whose energy exceeds the
BPS bound by about 54 percent. These approximate solutions are constructed by
gluing together Q cones, each of which contains a single unit of magnetic
charge. In each cone, the energy is largest in the core, and so a constant
energy density surface contains Q peaks and thus resembles a sea urchin. We
comment on some relations between a non-BPS cousin of these solutions and the
dark matter halos of dwarf spherical galaxies.
