
Sea urchin population soars 100x in five years - pseudolus
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/24/sea-urchins-california-oregon-population
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jboggan
I freedive the Pacific coast on a weekly basis year-round. The little purples
are actually tastier than the commercially harvested reds to me, but it's a
lot less meat for just as much work. I don't see them really making this work
commercially, especially as much as the states (especially California) limit
commercial urchin permits.

Thing is, the environment will sort itself out. Two years ago the urchin
blight was hitting SoCal extremely hard. This year isn't so bad, a lot of
places have kelp coming back extremely thick, and the purples aren't creating
any kind of apocalypse. While it's true that there aren't as many sea otters
as there were in yesteryear there are plenty of reef fish that eat the
urchins. Sheephead are very numerous and they love crunching those guys - in
fact every time I gut one it's packed full of purple urchin debris. In five
years I'm sure there'll be an imbalance with too many sheephead, and we'll
have some other article to read and worry about.

~~~
bestouff
That seems like a generalized gospel in the US : the environment will sort
this out. The free market will sort this out. No worries, god's hand will sort
this out. I'm genuinely curious, are you taught this at some point ?

~~~
Enginerrrd
As an environmental engineer, albeit one educated in the US, this is generally
a pretty true statement provided you stop doing whatever it is that wrecked
the environment to begin with.

I have seen some of the worst environmental atrocities caused by people with
good intentions of "fixing it". Let it be, it's often halfway to sorting
itself out if you'll just leave it alone long enough.

~~~
acchow
Even Chernobyl pretty much sorted itself out.

~~~
smcl
For a very specific and narrow definition of "sorted itself out" (I presume
you mean that some wildlife has returned and some species flourish in the no-
go zones) - there was a substantial amount of effort involved in minimising
the ongoing harm, and people literally died as a result of the cleanup
operations

To say that Chernobyl sorted itself out is to _completely_ fail to understand
what happened and what was done in the decades following it.

~~~
ivanhoe
It would still sort itself out eventually, one way or the other. We can speed
up the recovery and try to minimize the impact, but even if there's no humans
left life would probably continue in some form. If some species are destroyed,
others would evolve into the empty niche. That's how nature works. That's
literally how we and all other life got to exist on this planet in a first
place, as a replacement for someone else less lucky/efficient.

~~~
lotsofpulp
In order to save time and energy, sometimes every detail isn’t spelled out.
“Sort itself out” presumably has a condition of not causing substantial harm
to humans.

It’s obvious the world will keep on spinning with or without humans, or maybe
not, and it’ll get eaten by the sun. But that possibility doesn’t need to be
addressed every time.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
For a complete and total failure of an industrial facility a death toll on par
with a bad bus crash is far below the threshold of "substantial harm to
humans"

Normally when something containing substances hazardous to human health and/or
containing a lot of energy goes pop like that it's a lot worse. Strictly by
the numbers the Chernobyl is not worthy of being called a disaster. We only
hear about it because it is the worst case in its particular niche.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industrial_disasters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industrial_disasters)

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mogadsheu
Tons of nutrient runoff into the coastline means certain beings will thrive:
algae, jellyfish, and apparently urchins. We’re lucky the other substances in
runoff aren’t doing even more damage.

The question I’d like to know is: why is uni still so expensive at sushi
restaurants?

~~~
l4yao
These purple urchin are a lot smaller than the commonly harvested red urchin,
resulting in less uni. Even the urchin are starving due to overpopulation and
loss of kelp.

~~~
thaumasiotes
"Starving due to overpopulation" can't explain the scarcity of whatever it is.
It is the opposite of scarcity.

~~~
Supermancho
I dont think so. You can have populations that reach breeding age,
overpopulate and starve. Especially where food sources are seasonal.

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amluto
I’m surprised that this article didn’t mention otters at all. Restoring sea
otters seems like hard work, but they eat tons of urchins.

~~~
nominated1
I thought the same thing after watching the recent Nature program "The
Serengeti Rules"

[https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-
rules-41dfru/2...](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-
rules-41dfru/20105/)

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RenRav
So instead of repopulating the declining starfish, the cause of the urchin
boom, they will ranch urchins to fatten them to eventually sell?

I guess you do what makes money.

~~~
nradov
No one knows how to repopulate the sea stars. Marine biologists have been
actively researching the causes behind the population decline for years. Some
species like sun stars are now effectively extinct in the northeast Pacific
ocean.

~~~
RenRav
Thanks, I didn't know it was that bad.

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ryanSrich
Seems odd that Uni is relatively expensive and rare in the US as opposed to
say Japan then.

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graycat
At

[https://www.pbs.org/video/the-serengeti-
rules-41dfru/](https://www.pbs.org/video/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/)

is

Nature The Serengeti Rules Season 38 Episode 2 | 53m 14s

I has some NICE biology science.

The first parts are all about starfish, mussels, sea urchins, kelp, and sea
otters and how they do or do not _balance_.

The researchers formulate a theory of _keystone_ species and illustrate that
starfish and sea otters can be examples. Then they continue and, in fresh
water lakes, count large mouth bass as a keystone species and, then, go to
Africa and the Serengeti and count Wildebeest.

They propose that _keystone_ species are a general phenomenon.

The beginning of the program, the first segment, on starfish in tide pools,
shows a clever biology experiment that starts to establish the _keystone_
idea. So, yes, without starfish, some mussels take over.

In the kelp forest of the ocean, without sea otters, the urchins take over,
eat all the kelp, and the system ends up with only starving urchins. Looking
at the video, the urchins do look purple.

Sure, for positive integer n and n species, have an n x n matrix A = [a_ij]
where a_ij is the _propensity_ or some such of species i to eat species j.
Then get rates of predation, start with a distribution of the n species, and
then with the matrix A push the distribution forward in time. Then, as just a
math problem, might identify a _keystone_ species in terms of the matrix A.

Of course, also see if the distribution converges. So, may be looking for
eigenvectors with eigenvalue 1?

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Aperocky
Happy to help by eating hundreds of them per year, those things are delicious.

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slavik81
There is one marine production which, from its importance, is worthy of a
particular history. It is the kelp, or Macrocystis pyrifera.

This plant grows on every rock from low-water mark to a great depth, both on
the outer coast and within the channels. I believe, during the voyages of the
Adventure and Beagle, not one rock near the surface was discovered which was
not buoyed by this floating weed. The good service it thus affords to vessels
navigating near this stormy land is evident; and it certainly has saved many a
one from being wrecked. I know few things more surprising than to see this
plant growing and flourishing amidst those great breakers of the western
ocean, which no mass of rock, let it be ever so hard, can long resist.

The stem is round, slimy, and smooth, and seldom has a diameter of so much as
an inch. A few taken together are sufficiently strong to support the weight of
the large loose stones, to which in the inland channels they grow attached;
and yet some of these stones were so heavy that when drawn to the surface,
they could scarcely be lifted into a boat by one person. Captain Cook, in his
second voyage, says, that this plant at Kerguelen Land rises from a greater
depth than twenty-four fathoms; "and as it does not grow in a perpendicular
direction, but makes a very acute angle with the bottom, and much of it
afterwards spreads many fathoms on the surface of the sea, I am well warranted
to say that some of it grows to the length of sixty fathoms and upwards." I do
not suppose the stem of any other plant attains so great a length as three
hundred and sixty feet, as stated by Captain Cook. Captain Fitz Roy, moreover,
found it growing up from the greater depth of forty-five fathoms. The beds of
this sea-weed, even when of not great breadth, make excellent natural floating
breakwaters. It is quite curious to see, in an exposed harbour, how soon the
waves from the open sea, as they travel through the straggling stems, sink in
height, and pass into smooth water.

The number of living creatures of all Orders, whose existence intimately
depends on the kelp, is wonderful. A great volume might be written, describing
the inhabitants of one of these beds of sea-weed. Almost all the leaves,
excepting those that float on the surface, are so thickly incrusted with
corallines as to be of a white colour. We find exquisitely delicate
structures, some inhabited by simple hydra-like polypi, others by more
organized kinds, and beautiful compound Ascidiae. On the leaves, also, various
patelliform shells, Trochi, uncovered molluscs, and some bivalves are
attached. Innumerable crustacea frequent every part of the plant. On shaking
the great entangled roots, a pile of small fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of
all orders, sea-eggs, star-fish, beautiful Holuthuriae, Planariae, and
crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms, all fall out together.

Often as I recurred to a branch of the kelp, I never failed to discover
animals of new and curious structures. In Chiloe, where the kelp does not
thrive very well, the numerous shells, corallines, and crustacea are absent;
but there yet remain a few of the Flustraceae, and some compound Ascidiae; the
latter, however, are of different species from those in Tierra del Fuego: we
see here the fucus possessing a wider range than the animals which use it as
an abode. I can only compare these great aquatic forests of the southern
hemisphere with the terrestrial ones in the intertropical regions.

Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many
species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of the
kelp. Amidst the leaves of this plant numerous species of fish live, which
nowhere else could find food or shelter; with their destruction the many
cormorants and other fishing birds, the otters, seals, and porpoises, would
soon perish also

~ Charles Darwin, _The Voyage of the Beagle_ (1845)

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overcast
Things like this are only going to get worse, as we continue changing the
climate. It's a good thing urchin roe is delicious, time to get eating.

~~~
taneq
Things are going to get different. It's only worse in the context of our
preconceived notion that the natural world is unchanging.

~~~
hanniabu
No, it's objectively abnormal.

~~~
Entropee
Which time-interval is your baseline for ‘objective normality’?

~~~
abootstrapper
The most recent where humans didn’t introduce climate changing amounts of
green house gases.

~~~
barry-cotter
Humans have been changing the climate for longer than we’ve been farming. We
killed off the mammoths, which turned the tundra from grasslands into taiga
covered in tiny low growth forest and dramatically reduced the albedo of lots
of Northern Eurasia. Humans prefer grassland over forest which is part of why
eucalyptus are so prevalent in Australia, they do better with fire than other
trees. It has been posited that the Little Ice Age was because when 95% of the
American population died there was a great deal less land management and
deliberate forest fires, resulting in more than two centuries of above average
carbon sequestration and a drop in temperatures.

Humans have been changing the climate for a _long_ time.

~~~
dominicr
Yes, but it is much, much, much faster now than any previous time. Plus we
have the knowledge of its effects upon us directly and the ecosystem that we
rely on to survive, combined with the technological knowledge & wealth in
order to reduce the effects and mitigate the impact.

~~~
Entropee
So you are talking about Calculus. 'Much faster' implies 2nd derivative.

What rate of change is your baseline for ‘objective normality’?

~~~
dominicr
You come across as somebody who's trying to fallaciously prove how smart they
are, so can dismiss any argument you think isn't worthy of your esteemed
intellect. It's not a good look. Your username adds to the suspicion that
you're just a troll.

If you really want to, compare the past 150 years with the previous 2000:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2)

~~~
Entropee
Seeming as you clicked the down-vote button and not the 'reply' button, I am
going to just assume you don't know...

Congratulations. You win the argument, and the internet.

Pointing out the problems without offering solutions isn't a very useful thing
to do.

~~~
dominicr
I don’t think I can downvote replies to my own comment on HN. But I’ll take
the internet crown anyway, thank you!

Edit: just tried it, I can downvote your original comment but not your replies
to mine.

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pazimzadeh
Do the eggs taste good?

~~~
defterGoose
Uni is phenomenal, but unless you're a true omnivore, I'd say it could fall
into the "acquired taste" category. In some sense they're also one of the
foods with the highest dynamic range. When it's good, it's heavenly, but when
it's not, it is truly hork-worthy.

~~~
berberous
I love it. The people that don't are usually those who get weirded out by the
texture more than the flavor. It is basically goop.

~~~
pazimzadeh
I've had sea urchin eggs before, but I was wondering about these specific
species. Has anyone in California or Oregon had them?

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arvinsim
Interesting. I would've thought that Sea urchins are not that common since
they are treated as a delicacy.

~~~
dominicr
It's partially related to the work needed to obtain them. There's very little
edible meat in each one and the processes to obtain that seem to be largely
manual.

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bmmayer1
So this is why uni keeps getting cheaper

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perfunctory
> the species can go into a dormant state, stop reproducing and live for years
> with no food

Interesting.

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tempsy
So why does Uni remain so expensive in sushi restaurants

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nradov
It's a different species of urchin.

~~~
ravenstine
And because that's what people are willing to pay for it.

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stanislavb
I watched a relevant documentary recently. It's due to global warming and
overfishing. Some of the fish that's eating them are disappearing.

