Rules Adopted to Save Sea Urchins : Seafood: Once they were just a nuisance. Now the yearly catch is worth millions. Sea creatures are made into a sushi delicacy in Japan.

Werner Kurn remembers when a sea urchin in San Diego was considered little more than a prickly nuisance.

Urchins, which feast on kelp beds off La Jolla and Point Loma, were overgrazing their welcome more than a decade ago.

“They destroyed the kelp, they stuck you, they were a pain in the neck,” said Kurn, president of a chain of retail scuba diving shops based in Clairemont.

Concern about preserving kelp beds became so great that the state Department of Fish and Game approved quick lime poisoning of sea urchins until the early 1980s, said Dave Rudie, owner of Catalina Offshore Products, an urchin and fish supplier in downtown San Diego.

But the success of the urchin abatement, coupled with the growing demand for urchins for sushi , presents a new problem. Not enough urchins.

A series of DFG regulations that went into effect this month now limits urchin fishermen across Southern California to only six days in the water during July, down from 14 last year. Fishing days also have been reduced in the prime-weather months of August and September, forcing divers to make the most of what little time they have.

It was the fear of seeing the slow depletion of all of California’s urchin beds--which bring in more than $80 million annually from the Japanese export market--that led the DFG to limit the number of fishing days and raise the minimum size for harvesting urchins. Sea urchin industry leaders helped hammer out the tougher rules.

“The regulations are designed to compensate for the fact that we may still have too large a fishery in terms of divers,” said Dave Parker, a DFG biologist.

Although the sea floor is still thick with sea urchins in many places up and down the California coast, Parker said, “there are a number of areas where sea urchins no longer are as abundant as they once were.”

Rudie said San Diego’s urchin populations have been “fished down” but are not as depleted as in Northern California and off Santa Barbara County. Studies on which the state judged urchin stock to be in danger were not conducted in San Diego where, according to fishermen, the urchin population has held steady for the last five years after being reduced significantly during the mid-1980s.

The state’s urchin beds have yielded about 50 million pounds of urchins over each of the last several years. San Diego divers are responsible for between 5% and 10% of the state’s harvest.

More than 90% of the fishery is exported to Japan, where restaurateurs pay from $35 to more than $200 per pound for urchin roe, a creamy, sweet delicacy used to make sushi.

Practically everyone involved in the industry--which has over the past five years ranked as one of California’s top fisheries in gross dollar amounts and price per pound--agrees that the stricter regulations are necessary.

“Our industry benefits from having a consistent yield,” said Bruce Steele of the Santa Barbara-based California Urchin Divers Assn. “To achieve this, we decided that the industry must impose some regulations on itself.”

But many divers have expressed concern that the laws will cut their income and increase the safety risk in an already dangerous industry.

Deciding to work at 90 feet--a level that many urchin divers consider too deep--Brett Cunningham had about 25 minutes to fill the two large nets he brought down with him on his first dive one day last week off Anacapa Island. By filling both bags and netting about 600 pounds of live urchins, he would be able to make shorter dives later in the day, when residual nitrogen stored in his body would increase the risks of deep diving.

“The bottom line is that the open and closed days makes me work in weather I’d really rather not work in,” Cunningham, 26, said last week as he piloted his boat through six-foot seas.

“I don’t think they had safety in mind when they made this rule.” Yet for Cunningham, an urchin diver for eight years, the benefits of deep diving at Anacapa far outweigh the risks, especially considering the new regulations.

It is more profitable, he says, than combing over crowded spots near Santa Cruz Island or off the coast that have already been picked over by the 50 to 100 Ventura County divers with urchin licenses.

Bob Wallen, 55, of Ojai, has also noted a safety concern. “I’ve already gone out on days during the regulated season that I would not have gone on before, so yes, it is causing a problem,” he said.

“But I think the rule changes were necessary,” said Wallen, who has been urchin diving for five years. “The stocks are being depleted too fast.”

This is the point emphasized by Steele, an urchin diver for 19 years and a member of the state’s Sea Urchin Advisory Committee that drafted the new regulations

“Which is worse?” he said in an interview. “To make money today and and rob future generations of a product, or to take care of the resource--maybe picking a bit less now and ensuring the viability of the fishery over the long haul?”

In the early 1970s, when the fishery was open to practically anyone with a boat, an air compressor and a diving suit, it was not unheard of for a single diver to bring in 15,000 pounds or more in a single day.

Back then, the price for whole urchins--set by Japanese buyers who run the processing plants and send the urchin roe to Japan by air freight--was often less than 10 cents a pound, Steele said.

Divers and other industry experts put the price for whole urchins today anywhere from 50 cents to more than $2 a pound, depending on size and quality. A good day’s take is anything over 1,000 pounds.

The roe--the industry’s euphemistic term for urchin gonads--compromise less than 10% of the total weight, biologists say.

Still, Steele said “the average urchin diver is making considerably more than he did in 1985, when we began the legislative process imposing size limits and limiting seasons.”

One industry expert estimated that a diver working his own boat earns between $50,000 and $70,000 a year before expenses.

The middlemen in the urchin industry are the large processing companies that clean, preserve and ship the packaged roe to Japan.

The new regulations have affected their business as well, forcing temporary lay-offs and leading to concerns over the industry’s future here, said Jim Kawaguchi, plant manager for Tradewind Seafood Inc. in Oxnard.

The closed days “affects the supply going to Japan, because where you had a steady supply once, we now have dwindling output,” Kawaguchi said.

Kawaguchi said he is worried that additional closures “could really impact us to the point where they might look for another market.”

Most urchin divers, however, said they see the new regulations as something that will keep their fishery viable, not kill it.

Said Leonard Marcus, a Santa Barbara-based diver since 1978: “These regulations are what we need to protect the fishery--we need more of them. With a little better management, this will be a fishery that can stick around, unlike so many other California fisheries.”

It is still a surprise to Ocean Enterprise’s Kurn that “urchin rights” have taken hold in California.

“I guess I’m out of touch,” Kurn said. “It seems like there are still enough to fish, and it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to get the animal activist excited like shooting rabbits. Urchins don’t cry or yell or scream when you rake them in. I still thought nobody cared about them.”