Why Sea Urchins Are So Expensive | So Expensive

about 20 000 pounds of sea urchins are delivered to this 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 the yellow 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 food 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 days 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 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 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's urchins michael looks for abundant kelp forest 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 so 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's a lot of sea urchins out there but there's a lack of kelp so even if you bring in 2 000 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 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 is to blame sea urchins can survive for years without eating even without gonads and after the decline of sea stars one of its predators in 2013 the purple sea urchin 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 red urchins with good gonads become harder for divers to find 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 a dangerous occupation can be as dangerous as you allow it if you don't keep really tight tabs on your gear and the mechanics of your boat it could easily kill you to make the job easier 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 rake it's custom made everybody's has their own take on how they like to have it done i've got all these fancy colors on mine because uh if i ever drop it i'll be able to see it 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 all right 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 do crack urchins on the bottom so that we can see what we're picking if there's enough product inside and what the color's like inside to make things more challenging michael can only harvest urchins at least three and a quarter inches in size you can't just go out and pick empty urchins so there's a lot more empty urchins than there is beautiful packed urchins that you want to sell depending on what they're eating depends on the grade of the urchins we got lucky on that one all right sounds good okay cool man see you on the inside [Applause] after a 12-hour day 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 by 4 a.m gene dimachi's team is already cracking and cleaning each one by hand [Music] 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 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 plus grade and we have to drop it down to 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 plus plus grade jean sells a 200 gram premium tray like this for 100 these uni are bright yellow or orange and come only from the sweeter male urchins they're primarily sent to restaurants but gene doesn't come by this quality of gonad 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 the 70s just before gene's father opened tradewind the government used to ask the divers the local divers to smash them kill him at the time until a japanese person came along and said no this is this is actually a delicacy in japan and after many trials and errors you know we also found out that santa barbara searching is actually really really good like one of the best in the world 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 was able to make the transition from the japanese market into the us domestic market survived at the time today gene ships his product across the us uni is one of the few seafood 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 uni that we haven't seen in about a decade we're seeing a lot more colder waters 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

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 11,428,790

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, Sea Urchin

Id: M6joZsJpXWM

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022