Nurturing Urchins

Cold and winded, Jeff Maassen emerged from an hourlong dive for sea urchins.

Maassen and partner Ron Evon hauled nearly 5,000 red sea urchins--a delicacy in Japan--from the sea floor near Prince Island, a barren dot of land north of San Miguel Island.

Within an hour of hoisting the entire load onto the deck of their 26-foot boat, the two Santa Barbara men returned the catch to the water with nothing to show for their hard day’s work.

But neither seemed the least bit upset.

“It feels so good to put those babies back,” said Maassen, 40.

It was the first day of an unprecedented two-day operation meant to ensure a future for the spiny creatures--and the divers’ livelihood. Each day in early October, a flotilla of five vessels moved the sea urchins from the nutrient-poor feeding ground to a new underwater home in another part of the Channel Islands.

The divers moved young sea urchins not yet ready for legal harvest from the area along Prince Island to the rich kelp beds south of San Miguel Island, where urchins have been depleted by fishing. Giant kelp is the sea urchins’ chief food supply.

The so-called translocation, the first of its kind, was funded by the state Department of Fish and Game’s Sea Urchin Advisory Committee with fees paid by California’s 500 or so sea urchin divers. Each pays 1 1/2 cents for each pound of their catch--which fetches up to $1 a pound--to support studies on managing and sustaining the sea urchin population.

Urchins are hardy creatures that can grow even in nutrient-poor waters. But their sex organs, the parts prized in Japan, will not develop large enough to be marketable unless there is ample food.

Bruce Steele, who organized the move, said divers hope not only to help urchins grow at their new home, but to decrease the concentrations in the old site to promote the growth of kelp.

“This is the largest attempt at this kind of thing ever done,” Steele said.

Since he claims no scientific background, Steele, of Santa Barbara, turned to three researchers from San Diego State University to help survey the area where the urchins were raised and determine a suitable place for their relocation.

Below the surface, San Miguel Island’s Cuyler Harbor--which separates Prince Island from the larger land mass--teems with beauty: colorful rock formations, numerous species of fish large and small, and sea slugs colorful as a rainbow.

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Along the ocean floor and attached to the rock walls lie both purple and red sea urchins--the latter the more desirable of the two.

“You used to get tons of good urchins out here,” said Evon, 33.

Diver Robert Hasty, 40, of Oak View is more blunt in his assessment of the current residents: “They’re garbage sea urchins. They’re nice to look at, but they’re not very good eating.”

For the move, the divers focused on red sea urchins in about 10 feet of water, within 30 feet of the island. After removing them from the rocks, they placed the creatures in orange baskets, each holding about 500.

The baskets were attached below the water line to the side of the boats, where they remained for the duration of the dive, apart from a brief spell on deck while the urchins were counted.

After a 30-minute ride around the island, the divers swam through the kelp beds, dropping their catch along the way.

“They’re loving it here,” Maassen said upon surfacing. “These are healthy urchins.”

Their new home is in 30 to 60 feet of water, among the giant kelp.

It may be a year before the researchers see any results of the move. But if the move is a success, divers will return to find an abundant supply of red sea urchins that display the characteristic sought by the Japanese: healthy, meaty sex organs.

Once considered a pest by those who harvested kelp, urchins have become one of California’s most valuable, near-coast fisheries, said John Dixon, one of the San Diego State researchers involved in the project.

Japan is the largest market for sea urchins, with consumers willing to pay about $85 at the current exchange rate for a sushi tray of the finest specimens.

Beyond gorging themselves on kelp, the transplanted urchins will attract others of their kind from surrounding waters, the divers hope.

“I’ve seen 100,000 urchins marching in a line in the sand toward food,” Hasty said. “The front animals will go to the food, and the rest will follow.”

It is suspected that the urchins did not move to the new site on their own because their current home area provides sufficient food, even if not enough to make them grow to marketable proportions.

It will be several years before the majority of the urchins are of legal size. Dixon said that in addition to ensuring their healthy growth, the divers want to make sure that the animals will reproduce.

“This has got to be more than a fattening enterprise,” he said. “Otherwise it will be like an Easter egg hunt. Everybody would know they were there, and they would be picked easily, and then they would be gone.”

Researchers will go back to the kelp beds this month to see how the sea urchins have adapted to their surroundings.

“They already seem to have gone right into the habitat, and are holding well,” Dixon said.

But Dixon concedes that the experiment might be a bust if predictions of storms and warming ocean temperatures brought about by El Nino hold true.

Not only would warm water hurt the kelp, but storms would tear the giant strands from the sea bottom, he said. In either case, the sea urchins could lose a major source of food.

Divers have always dealt with fluctuations in the urchin supply, Hasty said, and he and his colleagues hope their efforts won’t be stymied by inclement weather.

“We want to make a second generation of urchins and attract all the stragglers,” Hasty said. “And as long as El Nino doesn’t wreak havoc, we could do that.”