Sea Urchins

To an American, the name Santa Barbara may prompt images of leisure on a soap opera scale. Someone from Japan may be more likely to think of uni. That's right, sea urchin roe. It may come as a surprise to most local residents, but some of the most highly sought after uni in the world is harvested right off of their coast. Stand on Stearns Wharf and in the distance you can see the dim outline of the northern Channel Islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and Anacapa.

The Sunstar's ancient twin diesels fire up like an old man clearing his throat. Terry Herzik cocks his good ear to listen. They are losing compression, but sound as if they should make the three-day trip. Dawn glows faintly behind the gantry cranes and shuttered canneries that overlook Fish Harbor, a blighted abscess of Terminal Island.

Timothy J. McFadden, a 34-year-old commercial diver from Ventura who died after being pulled from the waters off San Clemente Island last weekend, is being remembered as much for his diving skills as for his willingness to help others. "You never want to say, 'God, why couldn't it have been someone else.' But, God, why couldn't it have been someone else?" said Mike Dahan, owner of Channel Islands Scuba in Ventura, who on occasion accompanied McFadden on dives.

Four years after the dwindling sea otters of southwest Alaska were placed on the Endangered Species List, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated nearly 5,900 square miles as critical habitat for otters in the Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea and Alaska Peninsula. Near-shore areas were chosen because most of the creatures that sea otters eat -- sea urchins, crabs, octopuses and some bottom fish -- are found in shallow waters, which also provide the best protection from marine predators.

A Malibu Municipal Court jury decided last week that sea urchins don't shrink--or at least they didn't shrink enough to acquit a sea urchin diver charged with harvesting undersized red sea urchins.

Veteran diver Vince Puleo offers a simple explanation for why the state Department of Fish and Game cited him for possessing undersized sea urchins. They shrank. "Hey, urchins are like anything else," said Puleo, 50, who has been diving for sea urchins off the Southern California coast for the past two decades. "When something dies, it shrinks. If you die, you're gonna shrink. When an urchin dies, it's gonna shrink."

Pity the poor, homely sea urchins. Commercial divers once cursed their voracious appetite for kelp and their lack of commercial value--and sometimes bashed the pests with hammers. Now, however, these spiny, softball-sized shellfish are considerably more than popular. And their troubles have really begun.

Centuries of excessive hunting on the high seas, besides devastating the populations of whales, sea turtles, sea cows and otters, has set in motion the collapse of kelp forests, coral reefs and other marine habitat essential for sea life, scientists reported today in the journal Science. A team of 19 scientists from around the globe has concluded that overfishing and overhunting have had far worse effects on coastal marine habitat than pollution or global warming.

Sylvia Earle is a world- renowned marine biologist and spokeswoman for protecting the world's oceans. She has logged more than 6,000 hours of underwater exploration and holds the depth record for solo deep diving set in 1985. * What is it like swimming among creatures in the deep sea? "I've seen octopuses communicating with each other," Sylvia Earle said in an interview. "They send signals back and forth. The octopus flashes all dark, then goes all pale.

This is the bittersweet tale of a great forest's struggle to survive. Unlike the trees that blanket the High Sierra, this forest is invisible to most of us because it lies beneath the ocean. Swaying to and fro with changing currents, the huge kelp forests that stretch intermittently from below Southern California to the Aleutian Islands have drifted to the edge of extinction several times in recent decades. Kelp is a dynamic part of the marine life cycle.

Four years after the dwindling sea otters of southwest Alaska were placed on the Endangered Species List, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated nearly 5,900 square miles as critical habitat for otters in the Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea and Alaska Peninsula. Near-shore areas were chosen because most of the creatures that sea otters eat -- sea urchins, crabs, octopuses and some bottom fish -- are found in shallow waters, which also provide the best protection from marine predators.

The Sunstar's ancient twin diesels fire up like an old man clearing his throat. Terry Herzik cocks his good ear to listen. They are losing compression, but sound as if they should make the three-day trip. Dawn glows faintly behind the gantry cranes and shuttered canneries that overlook Fish Harbor, a blighted abscess of Terminal Island.

Researchers have mapped the genome of the California purple sea urchin, a development that could advance genetic research into human diseases, according to a report published Friday in the journal Science. Sea urchins are popular research animals because they are easy to manipulate genetically and share 70% of their genes and proteins with humans, including those associated with muscular dystrophy and Huntington's disease, according to the study.

Hundreds of dead or dying purple sea urchins washed up into the Little Corona Marine Life Refuge tide pools in recent days, a phenomenon some officials blame on warmer-than-usual waters. "On Monday there were two or three hundred that littered just the tide pool area," said Amy Stine, Newport Beach marine life refuge supervisor. Normally, she said, she sees at most three urchin shells a day. "Most of them that are now left on the shore are dead.

To an American, the name Santa Barbara may prompt images of leisure on a soap opera scale. Someone from Japan may be more likely to think of uni. That's right, sea urchin roe. It may come as a surprise to most local residents, but some of the most highly sought after uni in the world is harvested right off of their coast. Stand on Stearns Wharf and in the distance you can see the dim outline of the northern Channel Islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and Anacapa.

If this were a documentary, the working title would be "Sex and the Single Sea Urchin: Just Another Day at the Beach," and it would start off with an old-style newsreel. Opening scene: Flickering black-and-white images of a laboratory at Columbia University in New York City nearly a century ago. Noted biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan peers through a magnifying glass at a jar of fruit flies, which produce new generations every 12 days.

Centuries of excessive hunting on the high seas, besides devastating the populations of whales, sea turtles, sea cows and otters, has set in motion the collapse of kelp forests, coral reefs and other marine habitat essential for sea life, scientists reported today in the journal Science. A team of 19 scientists from around the globe has concluded that overfishing and overhunting have had far worse effects on coastal marine habitat than pollution or global warming.

Sylvia Earle is a world- renowned marine biologist and spokeswoman for protecting the world's oceans. She has logged more than 6,000 hours of underwater exploration and holds the depth record for solo deep diving set in 1985. * What is it like swimming among creatures in the deep sea? "I've seen octopuses communicating with each other," Sylvia Earle said in an interview. "They send signals back and forth. The octopus flashes all dark, then goes all pale.

Killer whales that normally hunt seals and sea lions are now feeding on sea otters and creating an ecological crisis along the entire Aleutian Island chain of western Alaska, researchers say. The sudden loss of thousands of sea otters is allowing a boom in the population of sea urchins and those animals, in turn, are stripping the undersea kelp forest, laying bare vast areas that once were lush with the marine plant.

Re "Migration of Otters Has Fur Flying," Sept. 6. The apparently unresolvable clash between fishermen and sea otters is not served well when terms like "stray" are used to describe an animal seen in an area where it has heretofore not been seen. Only pets and livestock stray. Emotional arguments aside, there is only one fact that really deserves consideration in this matter, perhaps two. First, the attempt to "manage" a wild species is pure folly motivated by an understandable desire to maintain a financial status quo; in this case, a false population of shellfish created by the sea otter slaughter of the 19th century.