Japanese Hooked on Sea Urchins From California

In Japan, the delicacy of choice is sea urchins, and some of the catch is harvested off the coast of San Diego.

In fact, because the Japanese have been fishing extensively in their waters for hundreds of years, and because the catch there is seasonal, many of Japan’s sea urchins are imported from the United States. San Diego’s catch of the spiny underwater creatures is “small time” compared to the catches in Los Angeles and Northern California, said David Rudie, the owner of San Diego’s only sea urchin processing plant, but the business here is doing well.

“It’s stabilized,” Rudie said. “There were too many boats a couple years ago, but it’s stabilized now.” There are eight boats going after sea urchins off the coast of San Diego.

Rudie’s company, Catalina Offshore Products, exports about 20,000 pounds of the slippery delicacy to Japan each year, and he says interest in sea urchins here has grown since he launched his diving business 10 years ago--along with the interest in Japanese food in general.

Compared to the market in Japan, however, sea urchin consumption in the United States is minuscule. Rudie says about 30 restaurants in the San Diego area buy an average of two pounds a week from him, and a Fish and Game Department official said about 90% of the catch in California is sent to Japan.

An Acquired Taste

Noriko Toyama has been in the United States for 12 years and has worked in Japanese restaurants for most of that time. She said Americans have become fond of sea urchins, although she agreed that it’s an acquired taste.

“Once you like it, you cannot eat sushi without sea urchins,” said Toyama, who works at the Mr. Sushi restaurant in Mission Beach. “For people when they first try it, the texture is kind of slimy . . . (but) if you keep eating it you’re going to be like an addict.”

Divers catch the urchins between 40 and 70 feet below the ocean surface, Rudie said, and a good day’s catch is 400 pounds of whole sea urchins, although only 6% or 7% of that is edible. The divers in San Diego send the urchins to Rudie’s company, where the shells are cracked open and the meat is spooned out. The spiny shells, which the urchins use for locomotion and to discourage predators, are discarded.

It takes only about three days for the urchins to be caught, processed, packaged and sent to Japan via air freight, where they are sold to wholesalers in Tokyo, Rudie said. If the urchins take much longer than that to get to their destination, the meat starts to turn color and isn’t as tasty.

There are many ways to serve sea urchins, but the most popular way is as sushi, with rice wrapped in seaweed, said Mr. Sushi’s chief cook, Yukito Ota. Although the delicacy is fairly expensive here ($1.50 for a very small serving), it is even more costly in Japan. Depending on quality, the urchins can sell for as much as $100 a pound, said Tom Jow, a marine research supervisor with the Fish and Game Department.

‘Absolutely Exploded’

In Japan, Toyama said, “Everybody knows, even the kids know about sea urchins, and they also know that they are excellent and that rich people eat them.”

The fact that the industry has “absolutely exploded” in Northern California in recent years troubles Dr. Mia Tegner, a research marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who is an expert on sea urchins.

The problem arises because the adult urchins that are harvested often protect and care for young sea urchins under their spikes. “We’ve shown experimentally that if you remove the adult, the juvenile gets eaten,” Tegner said.

(The adult protector is never the young urchin’s parent, because sea urchins reproduce by emitting eggs and sperm into the water, and the resulting larvae eventually settles many miles from its parents.)

The problem is not as acute in San Diego as it is further north, in part because of restraint on the part of Rudie and other area fishermen, Tegner said.

The harvest in Northern California became so large so suddenly that the state Fish and Game Commission put a moratorium on licenses in July to harvest the creatures. This year, Northern California will probably double its harvest of 10 million pounds in 1986, said Tom Jow, a marine research supervisor with the Fish and Game Department.

The total harvest statewide for the first six months of this year was 19.5 million pounds, Jow said.