Urchin Ranch offers exposure to experimental cuisine

Mendocino County Public Broadcasting | By Sarah Reith

One of the final events of the first North Coast Kelp Fest, which wrapped up this weekend, was an open house at the urchin ranch. It’s a green-painted shipping container in Fort Bragg’s North Harbor, next to a former cafe that’s now the field station of the Noyo Center for Marine Science.

For two months now, captured purple urchin have been fattening up in aquaria, eating kelp pellets donated by The Nature Conservancy and actual kelp that’s being grown in a couple of tanks outside the shipping container. The urchin are a native species, but their population has exploded in the wake of a disease that started killing off their main predator, the pycnopodia seastar, in 2013. Now they’ve devastated 96% of the kelp, which is also the main food source for red urchin and for abalone, formerly one of the most lucrative fisheries on the north coast. The idea of the urchin ranch is to see if it’s possible to round up the now-starving urchin, get them into an edible condition, and market them. In this scenario, humans replace the pycnopodia seastar as the urchin’s most relentless carnivore. If it works, the ecosystem will be restored, and the economy will get a boost.