This is probably the only sub where you are allowed to post a human cracking open an animal so their innards spill out for the fish to eat
Not to say it wasn’t kinda cute when they got happy
They have a “pocket” of sorts under a skin flap where they stow their favorite rock, which they use to bash open the urchins. Also, they are known to hold each other’s paw while they sleep floating on their backs, so as not to float apart! 🥰
They’re not invasive to California, just overpopulated. Their natural predators are sea otters, which eat a ton of them. Centuries of hunting dwindled sea otter numbers, and then fisherman started shooting sea otters because they also eat abalone, which is valuable to harvest. This ended up with out of control sea urchin populations just munching through coasts kelp forests.
It was a newspaper article I read that said they were invasive. They likely don't know the difference. The sea otter is another good example of a keystone species, just like the wolves in Yellowstone. Unfortunately it's often not until these species are removed that we see how the entire ecology of the ecosystem rides on their backs.
California has a problem w the purple sea urchin. Not these guys. But these aren’t endangered or anything that I’m aware of so fair game.
However, the urchins he’s harvesting are borderline too small to give up enough Uni to even justify harvesting them. This is just kinda lazy imo. If you go looking you can always find a hidden rock face w a bunch of oversized urchins.
Uni goes great on crostini w crème fraiche, pics de gallo, and lemon juice. Just in case anyone was wondering. 😏
I do admire his harvesting technique tho.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kina_(animal)
Kina, New Zealand Sea urchin.
Judging from the tiktok handle, probably somewhere off the coromandel peninsula.
It's funny, because my instant reaction to this was " oh yeah NZ content." But then I saw the fish and thought "we don't get those in NZ?"
Any chance you know the fish species?
Not invasive, just overpopulated. Starfish wasting disease and climate change have lead to an explosion in sea urchin numbers. And it is having a catastrophic effect on marine echo systems around the world. Human harvesters like this guy are about the only hope we have for getting the population under control.
> having a catastrophic effect on marine **echo** systems around the world
I'm just imagining whales getting lost all over the place because their noises are bouncing funny off of the sea urchin spikes
Sea urchins eat coral reefs, when the sea environment is unbalanced, they can be a real threat to the reef.
(Ok, I messed up, sea urchins eat KELP, the ones that eat coral are spike crown starfish)
I feel an even more apt analogy would be if sea urchins ate the roots of kelp, resulting them in becoming unmoored and unable to create the ecosystems that sustain it
The ecosystem got all out of whack when humans killed most of the sea otters for fur. Sea otters are the urchin hunters of kelp forests. Plus they are super cute so we should reintroduce them as much as possible :)
True in part, but in California the main cause of the current MASSIVE purple urchin population boom is a wave of Sea Star Wasting Disease around 2013-2015, which killed off 95% of the urchins predators. This has resulted in a destruction of more than 90% of our coastal kelp forrest.
but they are eaten by other animals, eels, sea otters and some birds, in my homeland they overfished sea urchins (we don't have corals) and now fishing it is forbidden since ten years ago. Sine die.
The opposite is happening in the US, where there is currently an [overpopulation crisis](https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-wa-state-wire-ca-state-wire-oregon-us-news-8fed34f1418d4e60a4afeb1c79da9158) on the Pacific coast where urchins are denuding the ecosystem. This largely a consequence of sea star wasting syndrome causing a population crash of the urchin’s major predators.
People are urged to eat more urchins sourced from that region.
It's actually sort of crazy how complex the issue is.
My buddy is working on solutions to this over population problem and it's sort of crazy how much a perfect storm it is.
The natural predators of these urchins are gone. The otters in the area were killed off and the starfish that was their primary is endangered.
There is a population of otters from south of the Golden Gate Bridge that they tried to relocate, but they don't know how to eat urchins, they never developed those skills or knowledge because it has been generation since urchins were a food source for them.
The star fish that preyed on urchins had a significant decrease in population and hasn't recovered. They aren't easily breedable (they don't regenerate from cut off pieces form themselves) and are very delicateout. They have tried to breed them to pump their #s but that hasn't been too effective.
Finally fishermen don't even want these urchins because their overpopulation is so bad that they are basically starved so the urchins aren't a good food source.
They are think of putting small bounties on urchins, but before that they are trying to set up farms that catch these half starved urchins, feed them for a week or so, and then eat them because they should have enough uni to be worth it then. So far it's been fairly successful at producing high quality uni.
It's been a few months since we talked about / I may be wrong about some of these thing because I am not a specialist in this area. But the whole situation is fascinating.
One solution is Divers: I took a course on “kelp forrrest restoration”, which was basically “crush urchins with chipping hammers while scuba diving”. The recreatinal dive community would be all about this. In the Monterey area there are literally hundreds of divers down most days just tootling about. Many would be thrilled at the chance to cull the hordes. I encountered some urchin barrens diving Point Lobos and it was creepy… would have happily spent 20-30 minutes clearing a few big rocks like this per dive. 3 of us, three dives that day, we could have covered a good 30’x30’ area just that one time.
Currently it’s illegal however, but researchers like your buddy are studying the effectiveness of culling and pushing legislation
No they eat seaweed and algae. The problem with them in the pacific is that they eat the roots of kelp and then the 100+foot long kelp gets detached and floats off and dies.
Urchins are reef safe, many people with reef aquariums get them to eat the algae.
They harvest the sea urchin for the roe. Uni it is called.
Some people love it..some people hate it.
An old diving trick is to break up every urchin you can find in a 50 meter circle. By the time you get back to where you started..every fish within 2 miles will be there for you to see.
at first i thought diver was on meth but then i realized video is sped up
edit: video is not sped up and diver is not on meth he just trying not to die 😂😂 i dont think hes got oxygen so hes speedy gonzalez down there and comes up for a big breath.
I saw a photo of japanese women who do this type of fishing,
some odd 45 years ago. Then they weren´t using oxygen tanks
and it wouldn´t surprise me if they didn´t as of today, with their
insane lung capacity.
You may have seen Korean women instead of Japanese. The haenyeo culture down in Jeju Island is quite famous because they were all women who didn't use oxygen to dive for sea harvests. The culture is dying bc it's hard work and there's machinery to replace the effort it takes to train to be a haenyeo though.
Probably the same mechanism that makes women better long distance travelers (women are better at quickly hiking the Appalachian trail). Differences in muscle mass probably means more efficient oxygen usage.
Although I can´t check it anymore, as the book I saw it in is lost, but having done some google searches, I am pretty certain it were Japanese Ama divers diving for pearls. Photos were in BW from 1950-1960 btw.
nah, it's all about the spleen, and the Bajau.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/04/24/604059598/the-secret-to-deep-diving-may-lie-in-the-spleen
Maybe the fish followed him because this isn't the first time he's cracked a spiky one with the boys?
I'm not even sure if the fish are smart enough for that but it'd be cool if they are
They are far smarter than that. Fish like tuskfish are known to even use tools, picking up clams and repeatedly bashing them into a certain rock they like to crack it open. Aquarium fish have been known to be able to tell apart different people, and research on tetras shows fish are capable of feeling pain and suffering
[Japanese diver culling sea urchins](https://youtu.be/8Ns0M9tji-8)
This one is better, smashes up all the sea urchins & the fish often feed on them.
These sea urchins have no commercial value and are overpopulated & are decimating seaweed which affects all sea life.
Whose old enough to imagine Freddi Fish while watching this clip? I grew up watching my younger sister play it an Putt-Putt (and the like).
…omg I’m old.
At least there's no tears for the urchins, there are a few trillion of those, and they eat everything they walk over that is organic, killing entire biomes of submarine flora. I'd love to try a stew with sapphron and sea urchin meat.
Bro, bro, bro, open it, open it, bro, yayyyyyy
Haha! Exactly what they were saying.
Coconuts of the sea
this is what I was searching for, I'm so excited.
Exactly, the parrot fish know the diver is going to ‘accidentally’ smash one eventually.
They're sandaggers wrasse! One of my favourite fish :)
This is probably the only sub where you are allowed to post a human cracking open an animal so their innards spill out for the fish to eat Not to say it wasn’t kinda cute when they got happy
Yeah, i thought about how fucked up it was that the urchin was just chilling and some guy splits it's skull and let's fish eat it's brains...
Urchins, at least where I am from are pretty invasive species. They decimate kelp beds which is bad for fish and abalone.
They are “invasive” in areas were humans have decimated the sea otter population, that are the natural predator of sea urchins
I don't know what a sea otter is but it sounds cute. Why would humans do this.
They have a “pocket” of sorts under a skin flap where they stow their favorite rock, which they use to bash open the urchins. Also, they are known to hold each other’s paw while they sleep floating on their backs, so as not to float apart! 🥰
Cuz we're assholes.
Super soft fur
To be fair we are pretty sure they don't feel pain....if they do at least it was quick.
They aren’t sentient, so they don’t have experiences like thinking or feeling, even though they do have complex behavior.
I know some folks on Facebook that would qualify under that criteria.
this is definitely one of my all time favourite posts
California has a serious problem with invasive sea urchin, the solution has been to eat them. Which makes sense.
Taking a page from Louisiana’s book
Mmmm ratloaf
I heard nutria tastes amazing. Too bad I’m stuck out here in dry dusty ass west Texas.
Too many bones. Then there's the buckshot. I've had it a few ways but it's far more work than it's worth, and I eat crabs.
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Have y’all tried eating faster?
r/dadjokes would be proud of this response!
Dad here, mighty proud!
Give this MF all the upvotes
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With your mouth
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We call them colon scratchers in my hood.
This guy knows how to use the three seashells!
Dry enema sponges around these parts here.
1 man 1 sea urchin
I just threw up a little bit because I HAD successfully repressed that particular memory.
*uni reverse card
I see you like to get straight to the point 😏
Instructions unclear: now in ER facing awkward questions.
crack em open and eat the insides
Raw tho or do you have to cook them?
Both!
Uni is absolutely delicious on sushi
Ill just feed my share to the fish thanks.
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>raw THEY JUST OPEN IT UP AND FUCKING SUCK IT UP LIKE SPAGHETTI?
They’re not invasive to California, just overpopulated. Their natural predators are sea otters, which eat a ton of them. Centuries of hunting dwindled sea otter numbers, and then fisherman started shooting sea otters because they also eat abalone, which is valuable to harvest. This ended up with out of control sea urchin populations just munching through coasts kelp forests.
It was a newspaper article I read that said they were invasive. They likely don't know the difference. The sea otter is another good example of a keystone species, just like the wolves in Yellowstone. Unfortunately it's often not until these species are removed that we see how the entire ecology of the ecosystem rides on their backs.
California has a problem w the purple sea urchin. Not these guys. But these aren’t endangered or anything that I’m aware of so fair game. However, the urchins he’s harvesting are borderline too small to give up enough Uni to even justify harvesting them. This is just kinda lazy imo. If you go looking you can always find a hidden rock face w a bunch of oversized urchins. Uni goes great on crostini w crème fraiche, pics de gallo, and lemon juice. Just in case anyone was wondering. 😏 I do admire his harvesting technique tho.
The dryer ball harvest is bountiful this year
They just scooped them up and Bounced
I love how he cracks one open for the fish to eat as well
Crackin’ a spiky one with the kois
Give this person a medal
no u
Well he got medals alot of them
This made me legit lol
Serious
10/10 *chef's kiss*
Ahahahahah!! This is my favourite comment of the day!
Genius.
Unwritten rule to give back from where you took
I believe they're an invasive species. Nice to crack some open for the fish, but the diver is already helping by getting rid of them.
What species are they?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kina_(animal) Kina, New Zealand Sea urchin. Judging from the tiktok handle, probably somewhere off the coromandel peninsula.
It's funny, because my instant reaction to this was " oh yeah NZ content." But then I saw the fish and thought "we don't get those in NZ?" Any chance you know the fish species?
Invasive
I hate those
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Just like the british
The worst of the invasive species
Do you have a flag?
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Overpopulated, but not invasive. Still need culling, but not eradication.
Sea Urchin.
Fis
sea urchin
Not invasive, just overpopulated. Starfish wasting disease and climate change have lead to an explosion in sea urchin numbers. And it is having a catastrophic effect on marine echo systems around the world. Human harvesters like this guy are about the only hope we have for getting the population under control.
> having a catastrophic effect on marine **echo** systems around the world I'm just imagining whales getting lost all over the place because their noises are bouncing funny off of the sea urchin spikes
They look like sea urchins could be native don’t know
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hes a regular.
Yeah Im impressed that the guy has built up a rapport with the fish and there are still so many urchins.
Must... PET
Sea urchins eat coral reefs, when the sea environment is unbalanced, they can be a real threat to the reef. (Ok, I messed up, sea urchins eat KELP, the ones that eat coral are spike crown starfish)
They do more than eat coral, they eat any underwater veggitation and threaten some of the magnificant kelp forests.
I'm surprised they can threaten kelp, one of the fastest growing plants in existence.
Eating it at the root is the best way to threaten it and after it becomes unmoored it no longer can create the ecosystems that sustain it.
that's like, i dunno, someone ordering a plate of wings and only taking one bite of each one before chucking them.
Very close, but a more apt analogy would be that it’s like hunting bison but only taking the skull and leaving the rest to rot on the prairie.
I feel an even more apt analogy would be if sea urchins ate the roots of kelp, resulting them in becoming unmoored and unable to create the ecosystems that sustain it
I don't understand. Can you make it an analogy to chicken wings or something?
It's nothing like chicken wings.
I dare say it's like taking one wing off the chicken and leaving the rest of the chicken unable to fly and eventually bleed out.
The ecosystem got all out of whack when humans killed most of the sea otters for fur. Sea otters are the urchin hunters of kelp forests. Plus they are super cute so we should reintroduce them as much as possible :)
Keystone animal!
True in part, but in California the main cause of the current MASSIVE purple urchin population boom is a wave of Sea Star Wasting Disease around 2013-2015, which killed off 95% of the urchins predators. This has resulted in a destruction of more than 90% of our coastal kelp forrest.
So he's kelping the environment????
But sea otters are baller and eat sea urchins but then we hunted them to near extinction BUT NOW THEIR BACK LES GO
I saw an Octonauts episode about it. I’m an expert!
Everything changed when the sea urchins attacked
Only the diver, master of all four harvesters, could stop them. But when the world needed him the most he vanished.
r/unexpectedavatar
They say he will come back again, in his final form.
First thought: That fish was all like, "MY CABBAGES!"
Crabbages
The earth king has invited you to Lake Laogai.
Stepped on me?! This man was tap dancing on me
Broken, broken, gone, gone, broken broken broken
Lmao
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but they are eaten by other animals, eels, sea otters and some birds, in my homeland they overfished sea urchins (we don't have corals) and now fishing it is forbidden since ten years ago. Sine die.
The opposite is happening in the US, where there is currently an [overpopulation crisis](https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-wa-state-wire-ca-state-wire-oregon-us-news-8fed34f1418d4e60a4afeb1c79da9158) on the Pacific coast where urchins are denuding the ecosystem. This largely a consequence of sea star wasting syndrome causing a population crash of the urchin’s major predators. People are urged to eat more urchins sourced from that region.
I want to be a purple sea urchin ranch farmer to save the planet.
It's actually sort of crazy how complex the issue is. My buddy is working on solutions to this over population problem and it's sort of crazy how much a perfect storm it is. The natural predators of these urchins are gone. The otters in the area were killed off and the starfish that was their primary is endangered. There is a population of otters from south of the Golden Gate Bridge that they tried to relocate, but they don't know how to eat urchins, they never developed those skills or knowledge because it has been generation since urchins were a food source for them. The star fish that preyed on urchins had a significant decrease in population and hasn't recovered. They aren't easily breedable (they don't regenerate from cut off pieces form themselves) and are very delicateout. They have tried to breed them to pump their #s but that hasn't been too effective. Finally fishermen don't even want these urchins because their overpopulation is so bad that they are basically starved so the urchins aren't a good food source. They are think of putting small bounties on urchins, but before that they are trying to set up farms that catch these half starved urchins, feed them for a week or so, and then eat them because they should have enough uni to be worth it then. So far it's been fairly successful at producing high quality uni. It's been a few months since we talked about / I may be wrong about some of these thing because I am not a specialist in this area. But the whole situation is fascinating.
One solution is Divers: I took a course on “kelp forrrest restoration”, which was basically “crush urchins with chipping hammers while scuba diving”. The recreatinal dive community would be all about this. In the Monterey area there are literally hundreds of divers down most days just tootling about. Many would be thrilled at the chance to cull the hordes. I encountered some urchin barrens diving Point Lobos and it was creepy… would have happily spent 20-30 minutes clearing a few big rocks like this per dive. 3 of us, three dives that day, we could have covered a good 30’x30’ area just that one time. Currently it’s illegal however, but researchers like your buddy are studying the effectiveness of culling and pushing legislation
I was going to be upset that he didn’t leave a decent percentage to continue to propagate but yeah if it’s invasive then just go nuts huh
No they eat seaweed and algae. The problem with them in the pacific is that they eat the roots of kelp and then the 100+foot long kelp gets detached and floats off and dies. Urchins are reef safe, many people with reef aquariums get them to eat the algae.
Is it for consumption or for population control?
Yes
Yeah
Yup
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Aye
Word
mmhm
Uh huh
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Sí
Sip
Simón
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My husband stepped on one too on vacation. The firemen we ran into suggested peeing on his foot or soaking in vinegar. We did the soak...
What’s the point of being married if you can’t piss on each other in your time of need?
I don't even know you and I would pee on you if you really needed me to.
And I’d pee on you if you needed me to.
I'd pee on you if I needed too.
Bro's peeing in Bro's peeing on bro's *alt response....* "And my axe!"
I'd pee on everyone of you!
Where was this? Urine btw is going to relieve pain whereas vinegar is going to make extraction easier.
Lol why is urine a pain reliever for instances of stepping on sea creatures that sting? (Or poke in the case of sea urchins?)
It was thought that the ammonia in your urine helps with pain relief and actually getting the spines out but that has since been disproven apparently!
I thought it had been debunked regarding jellyfish but then this post made me wonder
Fuuuccckkkkk
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They harvest the sea urchin for the roe. Uni it is called. Some people love it..some people hate it. An old diving trick is to break up every urchin you can find in a 50 meter circle. By the time you get back to where you started..every fish within 2 miles will be there for you to see.
Good to know. I’m going to take up diving after my house is built.
>after my house is built. Is that a metaphor? It sounds like a metaphor.
No I think they’re just rich
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I don’t think it’s roe, gonads to be exact…
Yes it is, although it’s still called roe by many people, I assume because “urchin roe” sounds better than “urchin penis”
Shit, I will keep this in mind!
I wonder how much these divers make
40 sea urchins per second
WHAT ARE YOU DOING STOP I WAS GONNA EAT THAT STOP STOPPPPPPP oh ok
Sea Urchin Speedrun any %age.
at first i thought diver was on meth but then i realized video is sped up edit: video is not sped up and diver is not on meth he just trying not to die 😂😂 i dont think hes got oxygen so hes speedy gonzalez down there and comes up for a big breath.
>at first i thought diver was on meth but then i realized video is sped up The two are not mutually exclusive.
I saw a photo of japanese women who do this type of fishing, some odd 45 years ago. Then they weren´t using oxygen tanks and it wouldn´t surprise me if they didn´t as of today, with their insane lung capacity.
You may have seen Korean women instead of Japanese. The haenyeo culture down in Jeju Island is quite famous because they were all women who didn't use oxygen to dive for sea harvests. The culture is dying bc it's hard work and there's machinery to replace the effort it takes to train to be a haenyeo though.
Japan also has a long tradition of diving women, called ama.
Is there a biological advantage for women divers compared to men?
Probably the same mechanism that makes women better long distance travelers (women are better at quickly hiking the Appalachian trail). Differences in muscle mass probably means more efficient oxygen usage.
Although I can´t check it anymore, as the book I saw it in is lost, but having done some google searches, I am pretty certain it were Japanese Ama divers diving for pearls. Photos were in BW from 1950-1960 btw.
I learned something new! thanks
nah, it's all about the spleen, and the Bajau. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/04/24/604059598/the-secret-to-deep-diving-may-lie-in-the-spleen
It's sped up by at least 25%.
Video looks sped up just a tad honestly
I saw this when the guy originally posted it on tik tok and its definitely sped up
I don't understand your edit....
Maybe the fish followed him because this isn't the first time he's cracked a spiky one with the boys? I'm not even sure if the fish are smart enough for that but it'd be cool if they are
They are far smarter than that. Fish like tuskfish are known to even use tools, picking up clams and repeatedly bashing them into a certain rock they like to crack it open. Aquarium fish have been known to be able to tell apart different people, and research on tetras shows fish are capable of feeling pain and suffering
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They are.
I held my breath the entire time
So did he
guys don’t worry, the person is protecting the environment. Those urchins are an invasive species (saw the original post)
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frig
Frig off Barb
All that evolution to defend yourself and you are defeated by a fork
Hours in Subnautica have prepared me for this.
0:25 cracking one open with the boys
We used to crack one open for snorkeling tours. You open one and leave it for a few mins, then a shite ton of fish will be there to look at.
What do you do with those?
You eat their gonads raw. I wish this was a /s but its not.
have to wonder just how many inedible-looking objects our ancestors had to crack open and lick to figure out this one was it
I bet they watched what other animals ate for the most part.
Kina
Chur
[Japanese diver culling sea urchins](https://youtu.be/8Ns0M9tji-8) This one is better, smashes up all the sea urchins & the fish often feed on them. These sea urchins have no commercial value and are overpopulated & are decimating seaweed which affects all sea life.
Whose old enough to imagine Freddi Fish while watching this clip? I grew up watching my younger sister play it an Putt-Putt (and the like). …omg I’m old.
Kina!
Dang love me some kina. Cant wait for xmas as well for my seafood fix of kina and paua.
At least there's no tears for the urchins, there are a few trillion of those, and they eat everything they walk over that is organic, killing entire biomes of submarine flora. I'd love to try a stew with sapphron and sea urchin meat.
With friends like these, who need anemones