Can You Farm Sea Urchin?

Can You Farm Sea Urchin?

I've been obsessed with the idea for several years.

I grew up in Maine and spent a lot of time on the rocky coast. It's always been a mystery to me how there can be so many purple sea urchins, which are so delicious, and yet so few people who know to eat them. A mystery that seemed to offer an opportunity.

To get at the meat inside, you crack open their prickly shells with a hammer or rock, then pry out the soft spongy part with a knife and eat it raw. The taste is like the ocean distilled into something rich, briny, and kelpy—with just a touch of melt-in-your-mouth fat. I'd love to be able to buy them already shucked.

Sea urchins are reef-dwelling animals related to starfish and sea cucumbers. They have an internal skeleton made of calcite (the same stuff as limestone) and are covered by movable spines. These spines make them impossible to catch by hand, but they provide only marginal protection from predators like sea otters (which used to be plentiful in New England).

For millions of years, sea urchins have

I've never had sea urchin, which is a shame because I like sushi. And I'm especially ashamed of this because the name "sea urchin," in addition to being cool, suggests something that might be fun to eat. But I've never had it because there's no way to buy it around here.

A few years ago I started thinking about this, and wondering whether you could farm it, and I did some research online. That's about where things stood until recently, when for some reason the subject came up again. So I went to the library, found a book on aquaculture and looked up sea urchin. It turns out that you can farm them. So then I thought about how you would do it, and what else you could farm underwater.