Episode 5: An Ecosystem Balancing Act

Preview

Tom: Restoration is a good word, but I think it’s deeper than that. We’re really talking about stewardship of an out of balance ecosystem and trying to restore balance to that ecosystem.

Introduction

Jon: Welcome back to Tending the Tides. My name is Jon Bonkoski.

Suzie: And I’m Suzie O’Neill.

Jon: In this episode, we’re diving into a story about harmony—and what happens when it’s disrupted. On the Oregon Coast, a new movement is blurring the lines between using mariculture for “business” and restoring vital ocean habitats.

Suzie: Usually, we think of commercial development and environmentalism as being at odds. But as you heard from Tom Calvanese, Director of the Oregon Kelp Alliance, some emerging “restorative mariculture” practices are working towards just that: restoring healthy kelp forests and reefs by reducing an overpopulated species, while also creating market value.

Jon: Today, we’ll be exploring the story of “An Ecosystem Balancing Act.” This story’s cast of characters are bull kelp, purple sea urchin, the sunflower sea star, and community efforts to create win-win solutions that support economic and workforce development, giving people living-wage jobs in coastal communities, all while performing essential ecosystem stewardship.

Importance of Wild Kelp

Suzie: Before we talk about the problems, we have to talk about the hero of our story: the kelp forest. As we heard in our last episode, these aren’t just seaweeds; they are the “trees” of the ocean. They store carbon, and provide oxygen and essential habitat. Here is Dr. Sara Hamilton, scientific coordinator with the Oregon Kelp Alliance, or ORKA for short, further explaining why these forests are the foundation of everything we love about the coast and our near-shore marine ecosystems.

Sara: These are also incredible places of tourism and recreation and culture. They’re culturally important.

Additionally, kelps bring some climate resilience to our coastlines, because kelps are such prolific photosynthesizers, they actually dump a bunch of extra oxygen into the water around them. And so Oregon’s coastline struggles with ocean acidification as well as hypoxia. a condition where there’s not enough oxygen in the ocean, in the water column. And most people think, “Well they don’t need oxygen, it’s underwater!” but actually fish and crabs and everything else are pulling oxygen out of the water, same way humans need oxygen to breathe. So without enough oxygen, you get fish kills, crab die-offs. It’s harder and harder for lots of marine animals to survive and thrive. Within the kelp forest, kelps mitigate hypoxia and ocean acidification, because of all the photosynthesis they do, as well as kelps can reduce the impact of waves on shorelines.

You know, and sea level rise and coastal erosion are really important, really shaping Oregon’s coastlines right now. So there are species that depend on these forests as well as human communities that depend on these forests. A lot of Oregon coastal towns are dependent on natural resources. They were originally founded because of the sea otter fur trade. They became timber towns. Now they’re fishing towns in a lot of cases. So natural resources, the abundance of them, really matter to economies that are built around natural resource industries.

So one of the reasons ORKA got started had to do with fishermen out of Port Orford who fish a lot of rockfish and lingcod and cabazon, collectively known as groundfish. All of these species either spend time in kelp forests as adults or their juvenile stages. The fishermen were like, well, if we lose our all our kelp, what does that mean for the rockfish and the lingcod and the cabazon? These incredible species that make the Oregon coast—one of the reasons it’s so special, I think about things like abalone.

The abalone fisheries, which were mostly recreational, have been mostly closed down in response to the loss of kelp here in Oregon. The red sea urchin fishery has had to shift where they work, because their traditional fishing grounds are no longer viable spaces for urchins.

Kelp forests create these ecosystems that are diverse and vibrant. So that’s kind of the ecosystem and nature reasons to preserve them. But then there are all the human reasons as well. And I feel really lucky to work at ORKA because it is an organization that very deeply understands and cares about not just how the ecosystem is doing, but how the communities that rely on and benefit from that ecosystem are doing. Kelps support recreationally and commercially important fisheries.

Jon: So kelp provides critical habitat for a wide variety of species, from small crustaceans like mysids, which are only about an inch long, to gastropods, a wide array of fishes, and all the way up to our megafauna, like the gray whale, which can grow to nearly 50 feet long. But, it’s also a critical habitat for other species too. Like us, humans! Specifically, Oregonians. Without kelp, the very spirit—and economy—of the Oregon Coast could begin to fade.

Oregon Kelp Alliance released some of their findings in October of 2024, and its conclusions are troubling: From 2010 to 2022, Oregon’s kelp forests declined by as much as 73%, a loss they estimate, based on the value of kelp forests in other systems, is costing the state between $23 million and $53 million each year.

The Issue: Urchin Expansion & Struggling Kelp

Suzie: Right now, Oregon’s kelp forests are under siege. It started with a ‘warm water blob’ and a disease that nearly wiped out the sunflower sea star along the West Coast. These sea stars, scientifically known as Pycnopodia, are the primary predator of purple sea urchins, thereby keeping purple urchin populations in check. Historically, sea otters also helped maintain this balance, but, because of the sea otter fur trade, they were extirpated from Oregon over a century ago, meaning there is no longer a population here. While the ecosystem was already vulnerable, the warm water blob and the sea star disease have exacerbated the crisis. Joining us to explain further is Brad Bailey, co-founder and chief technology officer of OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch.

Brad: Five years ago, I was hearing reports from my buddies that the purple urchins had exploded. I got back in the water and took a look and sure enough, just urchins everywhere.

As an urchin diver, you get real excited. Oh boy. Jump in the water. Go, go, go. Problem is they’re all empty and starving because the kelp has disappeared from back in 2012, 2014, we had a warm water blob come in that really stressed out the kelp. They like the cold water, and then a vibrio bacterium created a starfish wasting disease, and 99% of all the big Pycnopodia starfish, which are one of the main predators for the purple urchins, they all disappeared. So that allowed the purple urchins to come down out of the cracks and the intertidal, and now they’re spreading down to 40, 50 feet.

And so the resource is huge out there. Probably close to a billion purples off the coast of Oregon.

Suzie: With climate-driven shifts and without that predator Pycnopodia, the purple sea urchin population has seen an unprecedented increase. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and commercial sea urchin divers have reported that in some areas, such as Orford Reef on the Southern Oregon Coast, the purple sea urchin population has grown 10,000 fold. Nate Jones, chief scientist with Oregon Seaweed and commercial urchin diver with OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch, has also seen the impacts firsthand.

Nate:  We call ’em urchin barrens. And they’ve displaced a lot of these kelp forests over the last 10 years. The urchin barrens lack a lot of food because there is no kelp. All the urchins have eaten it all. So we end up with empty, kind of starving urchins that go dormant. And we refer to them as zombie urchins, and they stay dormant throughout the stormy season. And as soon as the kelp starts growing back, the urchins grab onto it, eat it voraciously. And then we’re back down to an urchin barren again.

… I’d estimate this small area that we’ve taken, at least 10,000 pounds. The crazy thing is the urchins keep coming back in and filling it back up. So there’s plenty of work to be done.

Jon: Aaron Huang is the founder of OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch. His business, is named after the phonetic spelling of uni, which are sea urchin gonads that are eaten as a delicacy. Here’s Aaron elaborating further on what they are finding.

Aaron: In years past, in decades past, divers would basically go in and pull as many urchins outta the water as possible when the ecosystem was healthy. And they would basically just send the urchins to somewhere like Japan or California. And these urchins, when you crack them open, would actually be full of uni and you would eat them at a sushi restaurant or an oyster house or something like that.

Now, you know, eight times outta 10, seven times outta 10, nine times outta 10, you crack one open and, and it’s empty.

Kelp Restoration: Community, Culture, and New Growth

Suzie: These zombie urchins can live for decades without food, effectively preventing the kelp from ever growing back on its own. And fixing this requires more than just science—it requires a community.

Tom Calvanese, urchin diver and Director of the Oregon Kelp Alliance, realized early on that to save the kelp, they had to remove financial and technical barriers to the water itself. Here, Tom talks about a moment free-diving with a member of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, referred to by the acronym CTCLUSI.

Tom: We were diving and then surfacing and spending some time on the surface and just chatting. And I got to talking to him about friends, other tribal members and their interest in doing this work. And what I learned from him that day was that there was a lot of interest, which is great, but there was also a lack of access.

First of all, you need a scuba gear, which is not cheap. And it needs to be solid. It needs to be, gear that’s well inspected and all that.

The other thing you need is training. No one is gonna put scuba gear on a person and throw ’em in the ocean and say good luck. It’s gonna take a lot of training and experience.

So what I learned from him that day was, my friends wanna do this, but most of ’em don’t have their own dive gear. A lot of us have managed to get the basic diver training so they can dive, but they need more advanced training to engage in working underwater and doing these complicated activities.

That just got me thinking that, you know, that this is something that the Oregon Kelp Alliance needs to work on. We need to work to remove these barriers to participation among a population that’s underrepresented in the dive community.

Jon: This led the Oregon Kelp Alliance into a partnership with Reef Check, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation of tropical coral reefs and temperate kelp forests, and their Dive into Science program. It provides scuba gear and training to members of coastal tribes who have been underrepresented in the diving community.

Tom: What that program does is it provides scuba gear and training to members of coastal tribes. And so far we’ve worked primarily with Coquille, the CTCLUSI, and a couple of other tribal members. And we have a cohort of divers that have already done their first round of training and getting ready to do their next round of training, and we’ve provided the scuba gear for them to do that. So those who choose to proceed and advance their training, have the gear to do it and will also be able to participate in these restoration activities that include surveys and urchin controls and other things.

Suzie: This stewardship is about more than restoration; it’s about restoring a relationship. The program is working with kids from a tribal summer camp to collect urchins and make “uni butter”—reconnecting them with a First Food of their culture.

Urchin Ranching: Turning Nuisance into Luxury

Suzie: But what do we do with the millions of “zombie” urchins? This is where the mariculture magic happens. Entrepreneurs like Aaron Huang, Brad Bailey, and Nate Jones, with OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch, are taking those empty urchins and “ranching” them in their land-based system in Newport, Oregon. Here’s Aaron:

Aaron:  And so what you’re really doing now is you’re pulling these empty urchins out of the reef. You’re putting them in a bag.

When the bag is full, you basically bust out the CO2 cartridge that inflates a balloon. The bag floats to the surface, and then you pull both the diver and the net in. Rinse and repeat for a few hours, and you’ve got a few hundred pounds of urchins. You take those urchins on the boat, you hold ’em in cold sea water, you transport them back to our plant in cold seawater.

And this is where the life of a rancher comes into play, is that that rancher now has to figure out how to turn that empty sea urchin into a fattened sea urchin in under 10 weeks. And so our current operation today, essentially looks like a modular system inside a shipping container with recirculating seawater and the ability for these urchins to be in their own little pens, if you will. They’re really hungry and they’re trying to get used to what it means to be in the pen and to eat basically the little pellet of macroalgae and some other blended proteins and amino acids.

And once they get used to feeding on these pellets in about eight to ten weeks, they actually have uni. And they can be cracked open. They can be shucked. They can be processed, and then they can be sent to a restaurant in Portland or Seattle. And that can be consumed at a sushi restaurant, a raw bar, a winery, a private event.

And this is essentially what we’ve done for the past two years since we’ve been in operation.

Jon: Here’s Nate Jones again, sharing how urchin ranching can make a difference for Oregon’s kelps and seaweeds.

Nate:  By transporting these empty zombie urchins to our land-based urchin ranch, we can help give that kelp forest a chance to start growth and have a chance to recover without all of these urchins.

From my own observations, there’s definitely been a difference. I did a survey of our primary dive site when I first started doing this work. I saw 15 Costaria castata seaweed and a couple bare woody stipes of terra gora, like these woody sticks protruding from the ground. No leafy structures coming off of them or anything, looks fairly dead. And the only reason this other Costaria species was even there is ’cause it tastes bad. The urchin don’t like going after it. Nothing else was around.

Last season, however, I saw kombu, sugar kelp, terra gora, bull kelp, Costaria, and a plethora of other green and red seaweeds all over the place. It was gorgeous. Loved to be seeing that after almost 10 years of not seeing that kind of environment.

Infrastructure

Suzie: Reviving zombie urchins, learning to care for and grow them for market opportunities, requires creativity, collaboration, and access to infrastructure. In coastal communities where fisheries are a key part of the economy, ports and community-driven assets provide critical infrastructure for fishermen to access processing, storage, and initial distribution facilities. Who owns and manages the infrastructure determines what kinds of services are available.

Jon: The Port of Bandon, for example, is leveraging their unique assets, such as location and infrastructure to serve as a mariculture incubator for both new ideas and businesses. They’re using tumble culture to grow Pacific dulse—the red seaweed that we learned about in the last episode—to feed urchins. Here’s more from Jeff Griffin, the Strategic Director at the Port of Bandon about their partnerships with companies like Oregon Seaweed.

Jeff: Ports are really focused on our core activities, shipping, boating, recreational fishing, commercial fishing. But in our case, we’ve been able to build a small program, through grants, through partnerships with Hatfield Marine Science Center, Oregon State, Sea Grant.

Our early intentions were to partner with the private sector and do some trial runs and then demonstrate feasibility. So about six, seven years ago, there was a small company looking for a port to partner with, to develop the commercial side of growing dulse seaweed.

It’s a great seaweed. It’s a really nutritious seaweed, it’s pretty easy to grow and being able to pump salt water into our upland tanks seemed pretty feasible. So our agreement with Oregon Seaweed is that basically we manage the farm and grow the seaweed, but they own the seaweed and market and sell it.

There’s a huge demand worldwide appetite for urchin roe uni. And off the coast of Oregon, we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of these purple sea urchins. You could pull ’em off the reef and possibly fatten ’em up or ranch them in tanks and then try to develop some local markets for purple urchins.

So that’s what we thought we’d try to do since we already had a seaweed farm. We could try feeding them dulse. We’d learned how to keep the seaweed relatively happy in their tanks. The urchins we found were even more sensitive, so they didn’t like changes in salinity, first off, we learned that right away. They also need better water quality. Seaweed likes extra nitrogen, right? But urchins don’t.

We really wanted to kind of demonstrate this is feasible, because we want the private sector to take it on. where the port basically owns and operates the infrastructure—that would be the water system, the aeration pumps, the piping, the tanks—And we could work with entrepreneurs to kind of take it from there, right? To kind of develop the market, help in some regard with the growth, take all the lessons we’ve learned and start their own farm somewhere so they don’t have to spend two years figuring it out.

So that was kind of our other goal in this, to just try to try to help the industry figure this out. I think hands-down purple urchins got it going on. It’s a little sweeter, got a great umami of flavor, and its even a feel-good food.

Jon: 122 miles north of Bandon, in Newport, the Central Coast Food Web is exploring different models of support for coastal infrastructure. They’re working to strengthen local food systems by providing services and infrastructure needed to overcome existing challenges, like providing shared facilities and equipment. Not all start-ups can afford their own facilities, and shared infrastructure is a vital part of what it takes to create a place where businesses can start, grow, and thrive. Here’s Aaron again:

Aaron:   The Central Coast Food Web was started by Laura Anderson. She’s well known around the coast. She built a lot of her operations from the ground up, and focused on sustainable harvest and food.

During COVID, she had this vision that there were many others that could be like her, that could benefit from shared infrastructure. Infrastructure is a huge gatekeeper towards a lot of small fishers and producers, really being able to produce and distribute their own products.

We just happened to be down the street from her, and as we were starting to build our second prototype, she was getting the Central Coast Food Web off the ground. Eventually this year, it coalesced into us deciding we were going to build, the third container system, at her property to, avail ourselves also of some of the shared resources and infrastructure that she had built, for us to do processing, cold storage, and eventually distribution.

What the modular system does is it exploits the fact that urchins don’t need to move around much. You can put generally a large amount of them into a single raceway, and you can fit those raceways into containers that can be stacked. That’s essentially the thesis for being able to scale something like this, where you may not have a lot of land, and you may have limited space, and the Central Coast Food Web allowed us a little bit of flexibility to test out a modular thesis. And that flexibility has been really important for us this year.

Jon: Not only is OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch testing systems that could allow for scaling and mobility, but as you’ll hear, they’re working towards a system that mimics the natural cycles observed in open ocean environments to maintain water quality and health of the animals they are working with. Here’s Brad again to help explain.

Brad:  On the rocky reefs that we have now, the kelp is the primary producer that brings the biomass that feeds everything. Most animals can’t digest the kelps, so they are dependent upon the urchins to eat the kelp, and urchins are so primitive, they only digest 40% of what they’re eating, so they poop out the top of their head these little pseudo feces that are broken down 40%.

Then the sea cucumbers come along, crawling underneath the urchins, and the cracks of the rocks and will eat that waste and break it down into a real fine powder. That will feed the kelp as fertilizer. Also feeds the filter feeders, the barnacles, and the mussels, and the sponges and the tunicates.

So it’s a carbon cycle that everything depends on to be there to make it all work. And the kelp that breaks off in the winter and shows up onto the beach as wrack, will break down, feed insects, which feed the birds. So every year, you can correlate when there’s a big mass of kelp that year, the following year there’s more birds. Everything has to be in place to make it all work.

I was having some problems with, black spot disease on the urchins using my old method of filtration. And now that I’ve gone to dulse as the primary organism to remove the ammonia out of the water, it’s working real well.

So I’ve tried to copy the ecosystem that’s out on the rocky reefs. We have baskets full of urchins, and then I have sea cucumbers that crawl underneath the baskets. The urchins break down the pellets and then the cucumbers break down the wastes, and then the dulse in the tank breaks down the ammonia and cleans the water back up again.

I know everything’s working when I see them pooping out these little pseudo feces all the time. I get real excited when I see that. Urchin poop. Oh boy.

Suzie: While a community is building onshore to plump urchins up for market, the Oregon Kelp Alliance continues their restoration work below the waves. To build persistent kelp forests that regenerate year after year, Oregon Kelp Alliance uses some innovative approaches and the spirit of experimentation. While some ideas float and others sink, it’s all part of the collaboration and knowledge sharing that’s happening up and down the coastline. Here’s Sara to share more:

Sara: There’s a definite mismatch between the lifecycle of bull kelp—and a number of kelps are pretty short-lived, one to three or four years—and urchins, because sea urchins—we have two sea urchin species here in Oregon: red sea urchins and purple sea urchins. Red sea urchins, I can’t remember the exact number, but can live to be something like 150 or 200 years old. And purple sea urchins haven’t been dated exactly, but it’s likely they can live at least 50 years and quite possible that they can live as long as red urchins can.

So you have a definite mismatch, where if those urchins come in and overgraze a kelp forest, they can live a really long time and prevent the reestablishment of kelp, for not just years, but decades. So that is one of the reasons that our kelp forests kind of need a little help, need a little boost, getting restarted.  

We’ve started piloting a new method this year that we’re really excited about. It was developed first in Northern California, and by folks at the Nature Conservancy and Moss Landing Marine Labs in response to their kelp forest loss there.

Essentially, what they are is: it’s an anchor with a line going up to a little platform that’s about a couple feet long made of PVC pipes. When PVC pipes are capped off, have caps on their end and there’s a little bit of air trapped inside them, they’re neutrally buoyant. So they kind of float in the water column and then you string a couple feet of line on that PVC platform and you basically splice or attach little baby kelps onto that line.

Suzie: A note here: Sara is talking about her field season in 2025, which is the year when this interview was recorded. Since our interview, the Oregon Kelp Alliance team has moved into using biodegradable materials, like wood, glass floats, and Manila rope, instead of PVC. Back to Sara:

Sara: One of the cool things about these moorings is that they can be deployed from the surface. And so at the beginning of the kelp growing season, which you know, is gonna be April through kind of September-ish, you drop these moorings into your restoration site. They grow all the way up to the surface, and then once they reach adulthood, they become reproductive. And so they shower all those spores, all that new baby kelp seed all over the sea floor, where you’ve just removed a bunch of urchins.

We saw how well this was working in Northern California. We work really closely with those partners, and asked, you know, could we basically copy your technique and try it here in Oregon? We just put those out in May of this year, and they’re working really well, and it’s been super exciting.

We put six out. Each one has about 10 kelp spliced into it. There’s probably somewhere like 30 to 40 kelps left. Some of them have died or just didn’t thrive. but a couple of the moorings have already, the kelps have grown all the way to the surface and have started becoming reproductive, so they seem to be working pretty well. They’re almost working better than they do in Northern California with higher survival rates.

And one of the really cool co-benefits of doing these is you create this little miniature kelp forest habitat in the middle of a site that hasn’t had kelp in a really long time.

Actually we just went out diving Monday, and we brought back some videos of the kelp canopy—and super exciting ’cause there were like dozens and dozens of juvenile rockfish hanging out in the kelp canopy. There’s a couple scenes where the light streaming through the kelp fronds, and there’s like 40 little rockfish swimming back and forth.

One of our divers said that they saw a juvenile salmon in the kelp as well. And so like, yes, these aren’t wild kelps, but they do create habitat, you know, even if it is just for a short while, baby fish are only babies for a short period of time. So this could be hitting at a really important life stage for these fish and could be providing a little bit of that habitat that’s been lost for so long.

And to actually go out there this year, and there’s kelp, and there’s little fish using it, and it’s working so well has been a real highlight of my season.

Conclusion

Jon: From zombie urchins to world-class sushi, and from barren rocks to vibrant kelp forests, it’s a complex puzzle, and the issues at hand are immense. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that the population may now exceed a billion sea urchins coastwide, while the Oregon Kelp Alliance reports that nearly 900 acres of bull kelp forest have disappeared in Oregon. With Oregon’s researchers and entrepreneurs deploying new and emergent strategies, such as the special moorings used for kelp restoration and the land-based sea urchin ranching system, they are demonstrating how mariculture is an important strategy for restoring a balanced ecosystem on the Oregon Coast. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Tending the Tides.

Suzie: Next time, we’ll look at how creative financial mechanisms can help bridge the gap between financial capital and the communities and individuals that do the important work of environmental stewardship

Cheryl Chen: We start from a simple, but also quite transformative idea that stewardship and care is economic infrastructure and a business model. If we can pay for roads and power lines, because it keeps society functioning, we can and must pay for ecological care because it’s essential to the health of our economies and of course to life itself.

Credits

Suzie: This episode was hosted by Suzie O’Neill and Jon Bonkoski. Written by Tyson Rasor, Megan Foucht, and Jon Bonkoski. Edited by Tyson Rasor. Produced by Megan Foucht, Emilie Chen, and Kaitlyn Rich. Music by Imagined Nostalgia, Boxwood Orchestra, and Our Many Stars. Illustrations by Tony Sterling and design by Heldáy de la Cruz.

This podcast was made possible by our funders at Builders Vision Philanthropy; Builders Vision invests in and col­lab­o­rates with nonprof­its, busi­ness­es, and oth­ers work­ing towards sus­tain­able solu­tions to soci­etal and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges. Finally, this podcast is a production from Ecotrust, where we work in partnership at the intersection of equity, economy, and environment. Learn more at ecotrust.org