Mendocino Coast Purple Urchin Festival aims to educate, celebrate

Even maligned spiny echinoderms can be the belles of a ball.

How else would one describe the forthcoming Mendocino Coast Purple Urchin Festival, scheduled to be held in Elk and Mendocino June 17 to 19? The weekend festivities feature a creature that has become villainized for feasting on kelp beds and effectively booting abalone from a prime breeding and hunting ground.

The goals: To help people understand the role purple urchin plays in the ecosystem of the northwest Pacific Ocean, and to raise awareness of the reality that maybe these little purple critters aren’t so bad.

Co-organizers Cally Dym and Matt Kammerer have set out to rebrand purple urchins through a variety of experiences. Some of these revolve around science. Others focus on urchins as a food source. As Dym explains it, the hope is to change the way participants — and the public — think about these peculiar animals and therefore set the stage for a recalibration of the regional ecosystem.

“Our hope is that people come, participate, have some delicious food, and also gain a broader sense of how everything in the environment is interconnected,” said Dym, co-owner of the Little River Inn in Little River. “Purple urchins are just the latest animal to prove that point.”

It’s all about celebrating urchins

The agenda for the weekend is a mix of educational and culinary activities, each priced separately.

Proceeds from the events benefit the Noyo Center for Marine Science in Fort Bragg and the Mendocino Area Parks Association.

Festivities begin on Friday, June 17, with an outdoor demonstration of cracking and cleaning urchin, followed by a five-course purple urchin tasting menu prepared by Kammerer, the Michelin-starred chef at the Harbor House Inn in Elk. When we consume urchin, we eat uni, the animal’s gonads.

Kammerer will be serving uni from urchin that he and his staff harvest earlier that day, and the menu will be presented by Urchinomics, a restorative seafood company that is attempting to farm urchins on the Central California coast. Urchinomics kicked off a trial in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy at the Bodega Marine Laboratory in February 2019 and that ended in March 2020

The next day is all about education. In the morning, Josh Russo, president of the Waterman’s Alliance, will host an educational talk at Van Damme State Beach during which participants can learn the differences between red urchins and purple urchins, and about how to harvest the creatures safely.

International free dive competitor Greg Fonts will be on hand to offer tips about diving to get the urchins without oxygen tanks.

Later that day, Dym and her husband Marc will host a sake seminar at Little River Inn with sake expert Kerry Tamura of World Sake Imports. In addition to teaching guests about how to pair sake with uni-oriented appetizers, Tamura will lead guests through a formal tasting during which they can sip sample sakes from seven different Japanese prefectures.

Finally, on Sunday, June 19, the Noyo Center will host a day-long symposium designed to teach visitors about urchins and their place in the local ecosystem. Part of the program will include talks from two filmmakers working on a documentary about the urchin infestation and local efforts to fight back.

Educate people on ocean issues, changes

The Mendocino Coast Purple Urchin Festival was originally scheduled to take place in November 2021, but the event was rescheduled because of COVID-19.

The delay gave organizers more time to solidify the messages of conservation and protection; while urchins are the proverbial headliners at next month’s festival, the animals share top billing with climate change, kelp and abalone.

Abalone dominated the local ecosystem for years — as recently as four years ago, the Mendocino Coast celebrated these unique mollusks with a culinary and educational festival of their own. These ear-shaped creatures lived peacefully in kelp forests, getting more than enough nutrients from the surrounding habitats. Then ocean temperatures rose, purple urchins moved in, devouring kelp beds and starving the abalone in the process.

Researchers, fishermen and local media were outraged at the devastation, some likening purple urchins to the Evil Empire in the “Star Wars” films. That’s when organizers decided there had to be another path forward.

Kammerer, the chef, has made a name for himself by cooking only what he can source locally, sees urchins as an abundant natural resource to forage.

“If we want to promote the area but also provide education to the fact that there are a whole load of issues in the ocean, we need to draw tourism to the area but also educate people to the fact that purple urchin are causing disturbance in the natural environment,” said Kammerer. “One way to do that is to make (purple urchin) more accessible, to show people what they can do to help.”

Sheila Semans, executive director of the Noyo Center, agreed.

“Urchins, while very overpopulated at the moment, can teach us a great deal about resiliency,” said Semans, whose museum educates visitors on the “kelp crisis” up and down the coast. “Their ability to survive very harsh conditions is impressive.”

If anybody understands these challenges, it’s Russo. When he’s not leading educational workshops at Van Damme State Beach, Russo is out on the water, fishing or harvesting urchin.

In recent years, he has headed up Waterman’s Alliance urchin removal efforts —massive day-long events that comprise nearly 100 divers pulling purple urchin off the ocean floor and 30-40 kayakers who collect the animals in bags, then paddle them to shore.

Not the enemy, but an opportunity

The goal of these efforts is to clear the “purple floor” so kelp can reclaim the area. Early data suggests the efforts are working. In 2020, the commercial divers cleared a 10-acre spot in Noyo Harbor that was an urchin barren. In 2021, that same area had returned as a kelp forest, with nearly 10 full acres of new growth.

“It seems that if kelp seed spores are still in the area, the kelp will come back,” Russo said while fishing for bluefin tuna. “The goal of this commercial effort is to clear several areas up and down the coast to create a sort of seed bank where we hope kelp can proliferate.”

Of course, the long-term goal is to recreate an ecosystem hospitable enough for abalone to return.

Dym’s family has owned the Little River Inn since they built the place in the 1850s, and she said abalone has always been a huge part of local culture and local history.

The way she sees it, a healthy purple urchin fishery spurred by a change in public attitude about purple urchins can help create a chance for abalone to rise again. In the process, she said, the Mendocino Coast might even create a new industry with new jobs and new opportunities.

“It seems strange to say, but I really believe the more (purple urchin) we can eat and get people to want to eat, the more likely it is we can get kelp to come back and, eventually, celebrate the return of abalone,” she said. “These (purple) urchins aren’t the enemy; they’re an opportunity. The sooner we realize that, the better off we’ll be.”