Urchin Message : State Petitioned to Set Harvesting Rules as Spiny Shellfish Gains Popularity as Food

Pity the poor, homely sea urchins.

Commercial divers once cursed their voracious appetite for kelp and their lack of commercial value--and sometimes bashed the pests with hammers.

Now, however, these spiny, softball-sized shellfish are considerably more than popular. And their troubles have really begun.

The declining value of the dollar against the Japanese yen, as well as growing legions of sushi eaters, have moved the red sea urchin up on California’s list of most-harvested--and most lucrative--ocean species. This also has raised concern about the permanent loss of some urchin colonies due to overfishing.

Urchin processors in Fort Bragg, the newest urchin boom town, have petitioned the state Fish and Game Commission to draw up strict rules for the currently unregulated urchin fishery.

“The sea urchin harvesting industry in Northern California is gravely imperiled . . . by unsustainable and rapidly escalating current rates of harvesting,” one Fort Bragg processor, Dave Showalter, wrote to the commission.

“Forceful and rapid action by the Department of Fish and Game is required to protect the long-term viability of the urchin resource. . . . The resource is being destroyed now, not in the future. In the future, there may be little left to destroy--or to save,” Showalter wrote.

Biologists at state Fish and Game laboratories in Long Beach and Fort Bragg are not as pessimistic, but they also are concerned about the industry’s explosive growth, as well as the lack of knowledge about sea urchin reproduction.

“We don’t know how many are out there or how quickly they rejuvenate themselves,” said Peter Kalvass, a state marine biologist in Fort Bragg, 140 miles northwest of San Francisco. “There is a lot we don’t know about urchins.”

One thing the state does know is the size of the sea urchin harvest. Thirty million pounds were pulled from the ocean floor off California last year, said Dave Parker, a biologist in the state’s Long Beach laboratory. That represents a 50% increase in just two years and rivals the harvest of one of the state’s most popular fish, the rockfish, usually sold as Pacific red snapper.

“It has become the typical ‘gold rush’ situation,” Parker said.

“Orange rush” might be more apt, because the new aquatic argonauts seek only one thing: the urchins’ orange-colored sex organs. But rather than calling them by what they are, people in the industry refer to them by a more delicate name: roe, which actually means fish eggs. The organs, accounting for only 5% to 10% of the sea urchin’s weight, is a favored delicacy in Japan and in American sushi restaurants, where it is sold as uni .

Biologists and local operators estimate that about 90% of the domestic harvest is exported to Japan, as it has been since the state’s urchin market developed in Southern California in the early 1970s. As the large urchin beds there became crowded with divers and perhaps a bit depleted--scientists are unsure about this--divers turned their attention to the state’s North Coast.

“There is a flotilla (of Southern California urchin boats) here now--and there’s an armada on the way,” Showalter said.

At the same time, rising demand and attractive prices--around $10 a pound wholesale for uni , Kalvass said--have prompted two Fort Bragg companies to join the field. As a result, catches along the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts jumped from virtually zero in 1984 to 2 million pounds in 1985 and at least 10 million pounds in 1986.

The number of urchin boats here also has grown rapidly, from a dozen in 1985 to 65 or more today--and two out-of-town entrepreneurs have expressed an interest in joining the two processing plants already in operation.

Unlike Southern California, however, scientists are not sure if the urchin colonies off Fort Bragg and Bodega Bay, 90 miles to the southeast, can withstand such intensive harvesting--or how well the Southern California colonies themselves can cope with it.

The problem up north, the scientists say, is the smaller number of shallow, rocky kelp beds needed to produce the best urchins. Southern California, with a wide underwater shelf and the Channel Islands, has perhaps three times the amount of urchin habitat, Kalvass and Parker estimate. Chillier northern water and uncertain currents also may affect the ability of North Coast urchin colonies to stand up to indiscriminate harvesting.

Unknown Factors

“Even though they are really fecund--they can put out 100,000 eggs--we don’t know in this area how those eggs might be affected by currents and other factors,” Kalvass said.

“From what I know about urchins,” said Parker, speaking in a telephone interview, “the urchin population may not be able to respond to a harvest as quickly as it does down in Southern California.”

A big part of the problem, Showalter said, is the harvesting of juvenile urchins before they have a chance to reproduce. These small creatures, three inches or less in diameter, are usually routinely rejected by local processors. However, they can often be sold to buyers representing large Southern California companies, who pay divers for their catch by weight--regardless of quality--before shipping the urchins to Los Angeles for processing.

“There are divers out there who think anything with spines is worth something; they just don’t know any better,” said Showalter, a former natural-foods broker from Florida. “About half the problem is ignorance . . . but the other half is greed, and that is unforgivable.”

Looking Ahead

Other Pacific Coast states, sensing the potential for the same problems, already have taken steps to regulate the urchin industry. Washington has a management program designed to prevent over-harvesting, and Oregon is considering one.

Showalter and his fellow Fort Bragg urchin processors have asked California to implement eight measures, including a prohibition on harvesting young urchins, a limit on the number of working urchin divers and the amount of urchin each can harvest.

Divers working in 20 to 100 feet of water can hand-pick about 2,000 pounds of urchins in a four-hour day. With a rake and a less discriminating attitude, divers have been known to harvest as much as 6,000 pounds in a day. Urchins sell for about 30 cents a pound at the dock; divers usually split their catch with the owner of the boat from which they dive.

‘Very Lucrative’

“It’s a very lucrative thing for some people,” Parker said. Although still relatively new, the domestic sea urchin business has matured enough that divers have formed the Santa Barbara-based California Urchin Divers Assn. to represent their interests.

Even as regulations are being urged, scientists also are beginning to ask whether the intense urchin harvests might have some benefit for some other species, such as the badly depleted abalone.

“Some people say that by harvesting urchins, we may be opening up areas for abalone--areas where abalone had once flourished but don’t now,” Parker said. “There may well be some validity in that.”

Other people, he added, have mused that fewer kelp-munching urchins could spur new and bigger kelp beds, which encourage greater numbers of other sea species.

To explore these uncertainties, the Fort Bragg processors also have urged the state to tax the urchin business as it does other fisheries and to use the money for basic research and for pilot urchin-breeding projects.

“If we do something now,” Showalter said, “there’s no reason this fishery can’t be here for another 100 years. . . . But we have to do something now.”