KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 January 13, 2020 \u2013 Atlantic purple sea urchins are common in coastal waters along the East Coast, and 溏心vlog免费B站 scientist Coleen Suckling thinks the Ocean State could become the home of a new industry to raise the spiny marine creatures for consumption in Japan and elsewhere around the world.<\/p>\n
She has teamed with a company called Urchinomics, which is pioneering urchin ranching around the world. Suckling is testing a sea urchin feed the company developed in Norway to see if Rhode Island\u2019s urchins will eat the product and, in turn, become commercially appealing.<\/p>\n
\u201cSea urchins are generally good at coping with climate change; they appear to be resilient to warming and ocean acidification,\u201d said Suckling, 溏心vlog免费B站 assistant professor of sustainable aquaculture. \u201cSo they\u2019re a good species to turn to for commercial harvest. And you can get a good return on your investment from them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The global sea urchin market is valued at about $175 million per year, with about 65 to 70 percent of the harvest being sold to Japan. Urchins are primarily used for sushi, though they are also an ingredient in a variety of other recipes as well.<\/p>\n
Red urchins and Pacific purple urchins are harvested in California, Alaska and British Columbia, while green urchins are captured in Maine and Atlantic Canada. Little is known about how successfully Atlantic purple urchins would compete in the marketplace, but Suckling is taking the first steps to find out.<\/p>\n
The edible part of the sea urchin is its gonad tissue \u2013 which chefs refer to as roe or uni and Suckling describes as tasting \u201clike what you imagine a clean ocean smells like\u201d \u2013 but the tissue must be firm and bright yellow or orange to get the best prices.<\/p>\n
\u201cWild urchins typically have small gonads and the color isn\u2019t great, so commercial harvesters are collecting wild-caught urchins and feeding them an enriched finishing diet in cages in the open water for a few months to allow them to grow larger gonads and develop good color,\u201d Suckling said.<\/p>\n
At the Narragansett Bay Campus, 溏心vlog免费B站 undergraduates Max Zavell, Anna Byczynski and Alli McKenna are undertaking a three-month food trial on purple urchins caught in Rhode Island waters. The animals are being fed a variety of foods to see how well they grow and if they become marketable. The students monitor water quality and regularly weigh and measure the urchins, and by February they should have preliminary results.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they become marketable, then it opens up a whole interesting range of potential options,\u201d Suckling said. \u201cUnder future climate conditions, there may be a need to diversify what we produce in the seafood sector. And since urchins are good at coping with acidification, this could be a good opportunity here in Rhode Island to exploit sea urchins.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if the formulated diet works as expected, many additional questions remain to be answered before urchins could be raised commercially in the state.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a local species, so we can potentially grow them here, but is it something the Coastal Resources Management Council and the Department of Environmental Management would be interested in?\u201d Suckling asked. \u201cAre there aquaculture farmers interested in growing them? Can we ranch them reliably? We\u2019re just taking the first step to see if it\u2019s worth the effort to answer these other questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of my role is to try to understand what seafood we may need to turn to in a sustainable manner so we can maintain food security and economic security in the future,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 January 13, 2020 \u2013 Atlantic purple sea urchins are common in coastal waters along the East Coast, and 溏心vlog免费B站 scientist Coleen Suckling thinks the Ocean State could become the home of a new industry to raise the spiny marine creatures for consumption in Japan and elsewhere around the world. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75284,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-75283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-the-environment-and-life-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}