Sea urchin roe provides international opportunity

March 5, 2024 9:16 PM

Sea urchin roe provides international opportunity for NSW factories and workers alike. Workers from Australia and overseas help far south coast sea urchin factories crack the export market for the roe of a marine menace. Left unchecked, too-high numbers of sea urchins can devastate the marine environment. (Off the coast of California, for example, sea urchins were devastating the kelp forests until the otter population started coming back, eating some of the sea urchins, and letting some of the kelp forests grow back.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (6 comments total)

Uni is expensive. If harvesting them helps the environment then this seems like a win-win situation. Not sure about the reliance on foreign workers though.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 9:25 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

New South Wales, but Safe for Work.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:31 PM on March 5 [4 favorites]

I learned from this youtube video (business insider) that those yellow things, the part we eat, are the gonads. Fascinating!

Collecting & processing sea urchins is all manual, apparently, and requires a delicate touch to get the gonads out in one piece. The gonads are graded by quality: a broken one means a lower grade and therefore a lower price. So they gotta crack those spiny guys open, get the bits out, and pass them through multiple rounds of careful cleaning without breaking them... fast, because their shelf life isn't super long.

Altogether fascinating!
posted by Baethan at 2:54 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]

(one of the problems with California sea urchins is that the kind that devastates the already-struggling kelp is NOT the tasty kind apparently. They're little guys with gross gonads or something idk. We like the bigger kind of sea urchins, but they've been getting outperformed)
posted by Baethan at 2:58 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

Living and diving in northern CA for many years one learns there's an intimate and highly interdependent relationship between urchins, kelp, otters and abalone. In places where one finds an abundance of one (e.g. north coast) it's often because of a dearth of one or more of the other.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:00 AM on March 6 [3 favorites]

We have a similar problem here in Aotearoa (NZ) "Kina Barrens" are forming because of overfishing of snapper and similar fish, the kina (sear urchins) eat the kelp creating a uniculture of just kina which then starve and become useless as food
posted by mbo at 6:46 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]