A new project is underway to restore kelp forests in the Santa Barbara Channel by removing sea urchins and selling them to restaurants or turning them into agricultural products.
“It’s really been decades in the making,” said Kim Selkoe, executive director of Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, co-founder of Get Hooked Seafood, and research scientist at UCSB. “It’s really been the commercial sea urchin diving community that has noticed so much kelp decline out of the Channel Islands.”
Selkoe said that there used to be a vibrant kelp forest on the backside of San Miguel Island, but starting in the 1980s warmer waters from El Niño storms caused the kelp to die off. Purple urchins then started taking over and feeding on the remaining kelp.
“We’ve gone from like this rich three-dimensional forest filled with fish and snails and invertebrates and other algae, down to this carpeted urchin where nothing can grow; and as soon as the little spores land and start to try to grow again, they just mow them down,” Selkoe said.
However, when urchins are removed, kelp is able to grow back fairly easily, according to Selkoe.
“It just makes sense to our community of divers that if we could just take the time and effort to clear out some of these areas, they might come back as kelp forests and be persistent and be productive, both for the biodiversity benefits as well as supporting the urchin fishery again,” Selkoe said.
Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara (CFSB) is partnering with The Nature Conservancy California (TNC), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), Santa Barbara City College (SBCC), The Bay Foundation, The Cultured Abalone Farm, and Get Hooked Seafood on the two-year pilot project funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt to support kelp restoration.
Harry Liquornik, a local commercial fisherman of more than 30 years, said harvesting the urchins will be a new experience to add to his long career as a diver.
“Just doing something different and doing the restoration work, because that will be completely out of our normal box with going out and harvesting,” Liquornik said. “That, to me, is always a benefit, to learn something different.”
Usually divers focus on harvesting small amounts of high-quality urchins for culinary uses, but with this project, they’ll be trying to get everything.
“Looking forward into the future, we’re not doing restoration projects, but ideally enhancement projects,” Liquornik said. “The good thing right now is the conditions for kelp are actually really healthy.”
Trent Petersen, another diver involved in the project, said he’s excited to see a project bridging the gap between science and fishermen.
“It’s been really neat for me to learn the science behind things and try and look at it from a different perspective,” Petersen said. “I think the scientists we’re working with are also looking at it that way, where they’re happy to look at the fisherman’s side of it because essentially we’re the ones actually out there 100 days of the year.”
The majority of the purple urchins harvested will be turned into a calcium-rich fertilizer by Get Hooked Seafood. Some will go to an abalone farm near Naples where they fatten up the gonads inside the urchins to be sold to restaurants.
Selkoe explained that by turning the urchins into agricultural and culinary products, they’re able to support funding for more dives and urchin harvesting, which leads to further kelp restoration.
This project also aims to grow Santa Barbara’s ocean economy by getting people connected to ocean-related jobs.
“What we lack is the accessibility to these jobs,” Selkoe said. “People don’t know about them. They don’t know how to get into them. They’re not the type of jobs that have a textbook associated with them.”
As part of the project, Santa Barbara City College students will be connected with internships through Get Hooked Seafood where they’ll be involved with agricultural production.
Professor Michelle Paddack, chair of Environmental Studies at SBCC, said this is part of the college’s effort to create workforce and career pipelines for ocean-related jobs.
“There are a lot of students who come into my classes at City College who really love the ocean. They really love living in Santa Barbara, they want to stay here, and some of them don’t necessarily want to study science,” Paddack said. “There’s a lot of job opportunities and a lot of really important upcoming jobs that will be occurring in our ocean ecosystems that are really critical, that a lot of students don’t even know about.”
Students will be involved in evaluating the harvested urchins, measuring them, monitoring them and learning about how they get turned into fertilizer.
Dr. Jennifer Caselle of UCSB’s Marine Science Institute will lead undergraduate students studying how areas change after urchins are removed and monitoring the kelp growing back, according to Selkoe.
The collective team is working on evaluating sites at San Miguel Island where urchins have hampered kelp regrowth, and diving expeditions are set to start this spring.
