Why Sea Urchins Are So Expensive

About 20 000 pounds of sea urchins are delivered to the Santa Barbara factory each week, but it's not until you crack open the spiky shells that you see what makes sea urchins so valuable. The gonads Just one 200-gram tray of urchin gonads like this can cost $100, and some in Japan can sell for over five times that. Sea urchins are one of the few seafoods still hand-harvested by divers today, and in recent years, masses of them have taken over the seabeds of California. So why are there so many urchins, and how, despite this seemingly huge supply, are they still so expensive? Sea urchin, or uni, is a prized delicacy in several parts of the world.

Today, yellow and orange gonads are often served in sushi, and even right out of the shell, hundreds of urchin species exist, but only a select few are coveted foods. including the red sea urchin here in Santa Barbara, known as California gold. These gonads are prized because they're large, buttery, and sweet from the kelp they eat. To find gonads like this, divers need to collect individual sea urchins by hand. Michael Robertson has been diving for urchins for 15 years. He starts his day early, sailing out before the sun rises. It takes him and his crew about two and a half hours to reach a good diving spot. See that little island up there that's called B Rock? That's where we're going, so all this green right here on top of this red that's the reef is vegetation. That's a good thing that lets us know it's not sand, and it's just not bare rock. If there's vegetation, maybe there are sea urchins. Michael looks for abundant kelp forests to help him decide where to dive.

More kelp typically means better-quality urchins. 2010: On a good day, a diver could harvest maybe up to 2000 pounds a day of good-quality sea urchins. Now the divers are typically coming in with about three to five hundred pounds a day, or about a quarter of the amount, but surprisingly, parts of California's seabeds are full of urchins. If they wanted to, they could still bring in two thousand pounds a day. There are a lot of sea urchins out there, but there's a lack of kelp, so even if you bring in two thousand pounds, if they're not marketable, then we don't harvest them.

If you want to compare how it was to how it is, this was solid kelp from here all the way in all the way down, and now you have just little pockets here and there. That lack of kelp impacts the value of red sea urchins; it also strains the ocean's ecosystem and the species that rely on kelp forests for habitat, along with warming waters and pollution. In recent decades, a certain sea urchin has been blamed. Sea urchins can survive for years without eating, even without gonads, and after the decline of sea stars, one of their predators, in 2013, the purple sea urchins in population exploded, consuming more than 95 percent of California's kelp forests as it grew. Purple urchins are smaller and produce fewer gonads, so there's little commercial demand for them, and as purple urchins multiply and eat more kelp reefs with good gonads, it becomes harder for divers to find the right spot to dive.

Finding the right spot to dive is just the first challenge; getting your hands on these spiky creatures is the main one. Some people wonder if sea urchin diving is dangerous. An occupation can be as dangerous as you allow it to be. If you don't keep really tight tabs on your gear and the mechanics of your boat, it could easily kill you. Michael and his partner Fred need specific tools, so this is the one essential piece of equipment everybody has to have. It's called a Keith's custom-made Everybody has their own take on how they like to have it done. I've got all these fancy colors on mine because if I ever drop it, I'll be able to see them on the bottom, and my daughter loves putting the tape on once they're suited up. Michael and Fred head to the bottom and begin collecting urchins one by one. Even with the proper gear, a good dive is never a guarantee. Typically, there are only about five gonads inside each urchin, and without enough kelp for the urchins to feed on, the gonads start to shrivel up. In some cases, an urchin will be totally empty inside. We crack urchins on the bottom so that we can see what we're picking, if there's enough product inside, and what the color is like inside, to make things more challenging. Michael can only harvest urchins that are at least three and a quarter inches in size. You can't just go out and pick empty urchins; there are a lot more empty urchins than there are beautifully packed urchins that you want to sell. Depending on what they're eating and the grade of the urchins, we got lucky on that one, allright? Sounds good. Okay, cool man, see you on the inside. [Applause] After a 12-hour trip to the islands and back, Michael returns with 750 to 900 pounds of urchins.

The shelf life of fresh urchins is short, so they need to be delivered to processors that same night. By4 a.m Gene Dimachi's team was already cracking and cleaning each one by hand. and today we probably have about 10,000 sea urchins to go through. The gonads are extremely fragile, and they only stay fresh for about a week. Workers crack each urchin down the middle to avoid breaking any of the gonads inside. Then it's time for one of the most crucial parts of this process: cleaning the gonads. This stage requires sharp attention to detail; if workers don't totally remove the intestines inside the urchin, the gonads degrade faster, and if any of the gonads are ripped during this process, they immediately drop in value. The gonad breaks, then it drops a grade or two, and when it goes from an a plus grade and we have to drop it down to a b grade, the value is maybe about a quarter of what it could have been. Workers then sort the gonads by color, making sure each tray has a uniform shade of yellow or orange. After they've packed each wooden tray, they use tweezers to inspect each gonad again and gently remove any remaining kelp shells or spines. The most valuable gonads make up the A++ grade. Jean sells a 200-gram premium tray like this for $100. These urchins are bright yellow or orange and come only from the sweeter male urchins. They're primarily sent to restaurants,but Gene doesn't come across this quality of goat often. He typically only finds one premium gonad out of every 100 urchins. Sea urchin gonads weren't always valuable food in the U.S., particularly in the1970s. Just before Gene's father opened Trade Wind, the government used to ask the divers to smash them. The local divers used to kill him at the time. And after many trials and errors, you know, we also found out that Santa Barbara searching is actually really good, like one of the best in the world.

The Santa Barbara urchin was traditionally shipped to Japan until economic collapse stalled things in the mid-90s. Fortunately for Jean's family and other U.S. producers, a sushi boom took off in the U.S. around the same time. Those of us that were able to make the transition from the Japanese market into the domestic US market survived at the time. Today, Gene ships his product across the US. Uni is one of the few seafoods out there that they really haven't perfected farming yet. Until somebody figures that out, Uni is probably going to be a limited, highly sought-after item. This ultimately raises the price of rare-premium gonads. This year we're actually seeing a good-quality,high-quality university that we haven't seen in about a decade. We're seeing a lot more colder waters, and we're starting to see kelp grow back where it hasn't grown back in the last 10 years. After a difficult decade, things might be looking up for red sea urchins and the kelp they depend on.