On the Oregon coast, Nate Parker-Jones is a commercial fisher, but he doesn’t use a crab pot, or even a hook and line.
Instead, Parker-Jones dives for his catch, using a couple hundred feet of air line from his boat, rather than a scuba tank, to go after his target: a little creature that looks like a spiky tennis ball, called a sea urchin.
“I just drop down to the bottom and more or less walk around like I normally would on land, but the conditions can be wild,” Parker-Jones said. “Often, on a good day of diving, I can see my hand if I reach it out as far as I can away from my face, but just barely. And there are times where that visibility is three feet, but the surge of the waves crashing against the rocks can move me back and forth up to 10 feet. So you don't know where you're going to end up next.”
Parker-Jones is the lead commercial diver for the Newport-based OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch and chief scientist for Oregon Seaweed.
Commercial urchin divers are after the roe, or eggs, inside of an urchin, also known as “uni,” a delicacy prized in sushi restaurants.
A commercial fishery for sea urchins has existed along the Oregon coast for decades. Now, collecting these animals from the ocean is also an act of conservation. That’s because sea urchins are wreaking havoc on Oregon’s kelp forests.
Kelp forests exist along most of the west coast of North America. Kelp are a large form of brown algae that live in cool waters shallower than 130 feet, and tend to grow in dense groups like trees.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, these underwater forests “provide food and shelter for thousands of fish, invertebrates, and marine mammal species.” That includes megafauna like seals, sea lions, whales, sea otters, gulls, terns, snowy egrets, great blue herons, cormorants, and shore birds.
Recently, scientists have observed a change in the region’s kelp forests.
“From 2015 through 2020, we saw this rapid, systemic loss of kelp forests up and down the coast, and for the most part, in the places where we've lost them, they have not come back,” said Sara Hamilton, scientific coordinator for the Oregon Kelp Alliance.
In Oregon, one-third of the traditional kelp forest has been lost, according to the group. The loss of the kelp forest was so rapid that science is just catching up.
“I think in the U.S., it became a hot topic around 2015, 2016 because there was this watershed moment for kelp forests in the U.S., where the kelp forests of Northern California collapsed in a matter of a couple years,” Hamilton said. “Over the course of like two or three years, 95% of Northern California's kelp forests were gone, and it closed the abalone fishery there. It decimated the urchin fisheries. It [the urchin fishery] was a huge economic driver, and the speed and the kind of totality of that collapse really shook people.”
Hamilton added that the shock of sudden kelp forest loss in California spurred a lot of ongoing research. Scientists observed that while there was a sudden loss of kelp forests, there was a rise in sea urchin populations at the same time.
Purple urchins and red urchins are native species to coastal waters along the west coast, and their favorite food is kelp. Urchins are typically found in shallower waters along coastlines, but around 2012, a warming trend in the Pacific Ocean caused the urchins to go deeper and multiply. Hamilton says a warming ocean and the loss of natural urchin predators like the sunflower sea star and sea otters compounded the problem.
“In a report that we published in 2024, we found that across almost all of our kelp forest sites, purple urchin populations had increased, and in some places they increased up to like a thousandfold,” said Hamilton.
“Kelp is urchins’ favorite food, and so I kind of liken it to if you have one goat on an acre of pasture, you're probably good to go. But if you have 1000 goats on an acre of pasture, you don't have a pasture anymore. You just have dirt.”
On Oregon’s rocky reefs, purple urchins have created what are known as urchin barrens: large areas once filled with kelp forests that are now bare rock or sand, covered in sea urchins gobbling up any sprouting kelp before they have a chance to grow.
One might think that an explosion in sea urchins would be good news for sea urchin divers. But Hamilton said that’s not the case.
“Urchins graze the kelp down, and then the kelp doesn't grow back, and the urchins just kind of sit there in a little bit of a hibernation mode for years and years and years,” she said.
Incredibly, the urchins can remain dormant for years without eating, and basically start devouring their own organs.
“And so you crack them open, and they're actually empty. There's like nothing in them, or it's not high quality uni. It doesn't look appetizing. And so while there are hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of urchins on these reefs, they are not in a state where they are marketable,” Hamilton said.
In this context, commercial urchin diving and OoNee Sea Ranch straddle the chasm between commerce and habitat restoration. Commercial divers remove the emaciated urchins from reefs and bring them back to an onshore facility to fatten them up and then sell them.
Brad Bailey is co-owner of the OoNee Sea Ranch and designed the recirculating aquaculture systems where urchins, sea cucumbers and valuable seaweed exist in a partnership that mimics the nutrient cycle of an Oregon reef.
The various tanks and trays and piping and pumps are arranged in a couple of converted cargo containers at the Central Coast Food Web facility, located along the shore of Yaquina Bay in Newport.
“We use urchins, cucumbers and dulse for the three species that we have in the system,” Bailey said while holding a piece of seaweed he pulled from a tank. “The urchins eat the algae pellets, the cucumbers then eat the waste from the urchins, and then that waste from the cucumbers feeds the dulse, the red seaweed in the tank, and that cleans the water up, cleans it up so well that we never have any ammonia detectable in the system. So when we change the water to collect the wastes for scientific studies, the water going back to the bay is cleaner than the water that we bring in.”
Bailey said he’s just getting started.
“You see our prototypes here. We're building the first commercial system here this summer. Start small, prove it out that it's making money,” Bailey said over the sound of water pumps. “And then we're going to put in 200 raceways at the property we're looking at, which should do probably a million urchins a year. And that will generate four or $5 million in sales.
“So we can start hiring more divers, more processors, more truckers, more boat mechanics, build the infrastructure out even farther, and then see how far we can grow it.”
For Nate Parker-Jones and Brad Bailey, OoNee’s bottom line - and the kelp forests - would ideally grow together. As part of a strategic plan, Parker-Jones is removing urchins from areas where kelp still exists before he gets to the barrens, in hopes of maintaining and expanding the existing forests.
For Bailey, the time to act is now.
“Everything is so complicated and so intertwined out in the ecosystem out there, that changing one thing changes everything,” Bailey said, with a slight tone of resignation. “So yeah, it's still a work in progress. More research does need to be done, but it is time for boots on the ground. We've got to start actually making a difference in these urchin barrens.”
But conservationists concede that the efforts of the OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch and Oregon Kelp Alliance are only parts of what needs to be a multi-faceted effort to save Oregon’s kelp forests.
Sara Hamilton says the Kelp Alliance has seen success restoring kelp beds in the first year of directed urchin removals. For more long-term success, however, restoration of natural urchin predators like sunflower sea stars and sea otters are key to the ongoing success of kelp forest restoration efforts. Essentially, she says a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. For Hamilton, the solution is a complex mix of learning, art and determination.
“So we're already figuring out, like it's not just which levers, but it's which levers in which places, at which intensities,” she said. “And so there's a whole science, and frankly, kind of an art, to doing this work that we're just starting to wrap our heads around.”
In the meantime, organizations like Oregon Kelp Alliance and businesses like OoNee Sea Ranch and others will continue to reduce the urchin population and, by degrees, restore the vital kelp forest ecosystem off the Oregon coast.
