Gold Rush To Big Bust
by Catherine Schmitt, Science Writer with the Maine Sea Grant College Program

During the gold rush days, urchins became the second largest fishery after lobster, with a peak harvest in 1993. Then the urchin population began what would become a steady and steep decline. Above is a typical urchin drag suspended.over the transom. Chessie Johnson photo ©2008

In 1987, Maine lobstermen were fed up with sea urchins. The spiny burrs were filling their traps and gnawing through bait bags and generally being a nuisance. Meanwhile, the Japanese were running out of urchins, one of their favorite kinds of seafood. Our native species could fill the void, and for the next five years, urchin harvests soared, becoming the second largest fishery after lobster. The fishery was wide-open and unregulated and the sea was full of food and we were making money.

After a peak in 1993, urchin landings began what would become a steady and steep decline. We still considered sea urchins pests, and we may have disagreed on how to manage them, but we all agreed something had to be done. The industry even worked on the first regulations, self-imposed control to ensure future income and stability, passed into law on January 1, 1994.

We created a sea urchin license, season and a minimum harvest size. We banned night dragging. We established a moratorium on new licenses. We placed a “hefty” surcharge on licenses, and put the money in a fund for scientists and managers—over $2 million since 1995. We created a Sea Urchin Zone Council.

With surcharge funds, we started weekly catch sampling. We scrutinized dealer logbooks, and analyzed the global urchin market. We studied urchin biology, population dynamics, behavior, and survival. We tried different drags and dragging techniques. We closed areas to fishing and watched what happened. We tried seeding kelp beds with baby urchins, which were eaten by crabs. We moved urchins to areas with better food supplies. They, too, were eaten by crabs, because without all the urchins the kelp beds had returned, providing shelter for crabs and other urchin predators.

We should have started sooner. All of our rules, councils, and zoning were too late. The sea had shifted to an “alternate stable state.” We got together at sea urchin “summits” to discuss how in the heck we were going to cut the harvest by 25 or 30 percent. Though the summits were useful to DMR, they were not enough to prevent collapse of the resource.

We grew dissatisfied with the research we funded. Did we expect that science would solve all our problems?

“Science is a means of learning things, but it is not a solution to unsustainable management practices,” said Bob Steneck, a marine biologist who began studying urchins in 1975 and was a founding member of the Sea Urchin Zone Council.

Things were looking even worse in 2004 when the stock assessment model showed that urchin stocks had declined 90 percent in Zone 1 and 80 percent in Zone 2.

At the summit that year, this evidence from the research funded by industry was used to support DMR commissioner George Lapointe’s decision to shorten the season from 94 to 10 days in Zone 1 and 94 to 45 days in Zone 2. “It was an unpopular action,” says Margaret Hunter of the DMR, “but a very brave action, and I’m convinced it was the right one. But for the fishermen, they think, ‘Oh, this is what we get for funding research.’”

We still haven’t recovered from 2004. Sea Urchin Zone Council meetings have been sparsely attended. “Lack of attendance is more due to a sense of apathy than anything else,” said Jim Wadsworth, who has been in the urchin business for 20 years and currently chairs the Sea Urchin Zone Council. “People think, ‘DMR’s going to do what they want, no matter what the council says.’ Guys who are still in the fishery—a couple hundred instead of a thousand—have so few chances to make money that they make the most of it when they can, and they’re the best in the business.”

“If we just look at where we are, it would be easy to walk away. But that doesn’t make sense. We have to look at where we’ve been, and where we want to be in the future” says Sherman Hoyt, a fisheries outreach coordinator with University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Maine Sea Grant.

Had we passed laws to regulate the fishery sooner, and made the laws stricter, and established the council and the summits earlier, maybe the sea urchin would not have become everyone’s favorite example of a boom-and-bust fishery. But we learned, and we vowed not to make the same mistake with new fisheries.

“Certainly, our experience continues to influence our decisions, such as the decision a few years ago not to have a brown shrimp fishery, to place early constraints on the whelk and green crab fisheries, and to keep a more careful eye on cucumbers, mussels, seaweed, quahogs, scallops, etc.,” says Hunter. “There will be discussion in the coming year about limited entry for shrimp and scallops, the last two major state fisheries that are still open-access.”

We used the dedicated research fund and zone council setup as a model for other fisheries, and we passed An Act to Establish a Framework for Management of Emerging Fisheries. But this act does not address the systemic problem of money. “We’re now seeing the effects of a lack of resources on all of our fisheries,” lamented Hoyt.

This lack of funding and support at the state level is one force behind the shift toward management that partners the DMR with communities, where we maximize the amount of information coming from local resource users, and shift stewardship to communities.

Today the urchin fishery is concentrated in Washington County. “Most days there’s a shortage of urchins, and buyers are fighting for them and guys are getting more money than ever for urchins—$2-3 per pound on a regular basis. We should be thankful for that, because its allowed a lot of people to stay in it,” said Wadsworth, who is betting that the Russian urchin fishery is following the same path as Maine’s. “My strategy is to conserve the resource, so that when the Russian fishery is fished out, we could supply Japan again. The urchins are better quality today, because they have more food, and we could have a niche fishery. Unfortunately, it’s looking like we’re still overfishing, even with our shortened season.”

Despite all this, Wadsworth has hope for how our story will end. “Urchins are pretty durable creatures, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they could come back.”