North Pacific Urchins - taken from February National Fisherman Magazine

Weak market thinning diver ranks; sea otters thinning urchin ranks.

Alaska’s urchin divers can expect slimmer pickings, thanks to an abundant sea otter population, but other economic factors will have to change before anybody cries too loudly about otter-driven reductions in quotas and area closures to the fisheries.

Interest in diving for urchins remains relatively low — mostly because ex-vessel prices are around 32 cents per pound, and many divers have been thickening their wallets with shore side jobs and funneling their dive efforts toward the more lucrative geoduck and sea cucumber fisheries.

According to Alaska Department of Fish and Game data, 40 divers are participating in the urchin fishery this season, which runs from October to September. This year’s participation is up from the 33 divers who collected urchins two years ago. But it’s a meager lot compared to the 150 who harvested urchins during the 1996-97 season.

Ex-vessel prices back then were roughly the same: around the 35-cent-per-pound mark, and the quota was nearly 6 million pounds, a bit higher than this year’s quota of around 5 million pounds. Divers left 5.5 percent of the quota uncaught in the 1997-98 season. Each year since, divers have harvested less. Alaska divers left 44 percent of the urchin quota on the table last year.

The main reason for the reduced interest on the diving and processing ends of the business has been waning optimism in the Japanese market. Urchin roe, like herring roe, sells through specialty markets, which have become fickle. Trade routes have expanded, thus making a myriad of seafood products available in most countries.

The number of processors interested in buying product from Alaska has also decreased. There were seven mainstay buyers in the late ’90s but only two during the past two seasons.

Aiming to reinvigorate the industry’s primary processing sector, new regulations let divers crack urchins aboard their vessels. The regulations came on the heels of diver-generated proposals to the Alaska Board of Fisheries last year.

But, as this year’s season unfolded, divers apparently learned something. They found out that there’s not enough time to dive, process and ship the salted roe to secondary processors, who would send it to Japan.

“We only had a few takers, and they mentioned that it was too time intensive,” says Scott Walker, area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, in Ketchikan.

Meanwhile, urchin populations have been diminishing in some areas, thanks to a thriving sea otter population.

Divers would be among the first to classify sea otter populations as overabundant. And anecdotal evidence from the Department of Fish and Game suggests the furry critters are not only plentiful but decimating urchin stocks, particularly near Sitka.

What’s worse for the dive industry is that urchins are among the last of choices in an otter’s diet. Besides contributing to the closures of four urchin dive areas, the otters have been blamed for cleaning out substantial quantities of sea cucumbers, horse clams, and geoduck. And they were a chief player in demise of the abalone fishery, which closed in the mid 1990s.

“The abalone fishery is gone,” says Julie Decker, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association. “And the Sitka urchin fishery is completely gone.”

Marc Pritchett, an area shellfish manager with the fish and game department in Juneau, participates in dive surveys and has seen for himself what otters can do to urchin beds.

“You could tell where the otters had been; they pretty much wiped out the urchins,” Pritchett says.

While conducting surveys in 2001, Pritchett noted at least two rafts of about 100 otters working the beds in one dive area. Last year, Pritchett noted only three dozen otters in the same area. That suggests the otters had cleaned out the urchins and moved on.

Scott Walker, another area shellfish management biologist from Ketchikan, says that otters in pursuit of urchins and other invertebrates have pockmarked vast areas of the ocean bottom with trenches approximately 2 feet wide, 4 feet deep and 8 feet long.

“The entire bottom was covered with shells and spines as far as you could see,” says Walker, who’s been diving for 13 years.

Walker visited one of the areas a year later and found a notable absence of spines, shells and living urchins. If not for the previous surveys, Walker says it would be easy to conclude that there had never been an urchin population in the first place.

“They ate something like 2 million pounds of urchins in one year,” Walker says.

— Charlie Ess