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b'June 20, 2022 \\u2014 The first annual urchinfest took place this weekend, with opportunities to learn about urchins and their environment, and to eat them raw on the beach at Van Damme State Park in Little River.\\nA woman named Juanita described the flavor as \\u201csomeone sweet and buttery. It just slides down really easily. Maybe it\\u2019s a softer texture than raw fish, but I love it.\\u201d She had just sampled some of the red urchin uni harvested by Greg Fonts, a freediver and spear fisherman who was wearing a shirt that said \\u201cMeateater\\u201d as he cracked into the spiny creatures.\\nAbout 120 people showed up on Saturday morning to watch the demonstration, hear about the urchin, and have a chance at a taste.\\nNot that there\\u2019s much to eat out of the spiny purple shell. A mysterious illness has killed off most of the sunflower sea stars, which were the urchins\\u2019 main predator. The purple urchin have overpopulated and devoured the kelp, and now they hang out in a dormant malnourished state. Unlike the red urchin, the purple urchin have no marketable value.\\n\\nJoshua Russo is president of the Watermen\\u2019s Alliance, a recreational divers association that\\u2019s part of an effort to remove the urchins from some small areas. The idea is to create a few refugia for kelp so it can re-seed itself if ocean conditions start to balance out again. In 2019, the recreational limit for purple urchin was doubled from the previous year\\u2019s limit, to forty gallons per diver in Mendocino, Sonoma, and Humboldt counties. And in Caspar Cove, there is no recreational limit and divers are allowed to crush the urchins in the water.\\n\\u201cWhat we\\u2019re doing is under a scientific collection permit,\\u201d Russo explained. \\u201cPart of the project is to see if divers will voluntarily report their activity. Reef Check (a non-profit that trains citizen scientists to collect data on California\\u2019s kelp forest ecosystems) has a website set up where divers can report their activity. It basically asks how many you think you culled in a dive, how many people were with you, how many dives you made, were you scuba or free-diving\\u2026it\\u2019s not a legal requirement, but we are hoping that everyone will report, because if people are doing it and not reporting, the department (California Department of Fish and Wildlife) will let the regulation expire. Part of the program is to see if people will voluntarily provide that information so we can use it to prove that what we\\u2019re doing is effective and it doesn\\u2019t harm anything.\\u201d\\nThe purple urchin has another missing predator, in addition to the sunflower sea star. The otter was hunted out of the area by fur trappers in the 19th century. Russo says there are several shortcomings to any plan to reintroduce the otter to clear out the purple urchin. \\u201cThe problem with that is these urchin are void of much material, so even if they were full, there\\u2019s a study that shows that otters are taught what to eat by their parents. So if you brought an otter up here that was not shown how to eat urchin, it wouldn\\u2019t even see them as a food source. So you would have to bring the right otters up here, and very quickly, they would open up a few urchin and learn there was nothing in them, so very quickly, they would move right over to anything else. Abalone, crab, anything they could get their hands on.\\u201d\\nWarm ocean conditions from 2014-2019 didn\\u2019t help the kelp at all. In the past couple of years, the ocean has been cooling off a little, and the kelp is showing some signs of recovery, but Tristin McHugh, the kelp project director with the Nature Conservancy, says it\\u2019s still historically low. \\nThere is some money available for studies like the one Russo is involved in. Starting in 2020, Reef Check received a half-million dollar grant from the Ocean Protection Council to work with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and a variety of non-profits and commercial fishermen to figure out how to reduce urchin to what McHugh calls, \\u201cthis magical threshold value that would potentially facilitate kelp growth.\\u201d That is about two urchin of any species per square meter. The challenge, McHugh says, \\u201cis trying to understand what to do when red urchin are also grazers, but also have commercial uses, as opposed to the purple urchin at this point.\\u201d Commercial divers are effective at culling urchin, but unlikely to do so without grants or other economic incentives. \\u201cWhat other tools for restoration can we test on top of that?\\u201d McHugh asked. \\u201cSo one thing we are starting here in 2022 is evaluating urchin traps at Noyo Harbor, with hand harvesting of urchin, and we\\u2019re also looking at Albion, with Moss Landing Marine Labs, looking at out-planting kelp in addition to hand harvest.\\u201d \\nThere was a promising sighting of a sunflower sea star in Mendocino last year, but for now, the known remnant populations of the once-mighty predator are in British Columbia and Alaska. \\u201cTypically, sunflower stars are pretty amazing predators,\\u201d McHugh said. \\u201cWe know that they eat young purple urchin, or sometimes even adult purple urchin. We also know they eat snails, sometimes other stars. I\\u2019ve seen them eat fish underwater, I\\u2019ve seen them eat anemones, oddly enough. Back when I first started diving, I remember seeing them just cruise on the bottom of the ocean so fast, just nailing everything in its way.\\u201d As for the cause of the disease that has devastated them, \\u201cThat\\u2019s still a mystery. We\\u2019re working right now to figure out what that is. Because it\\u2019s still in the system.\\u201d'