How do you go about establishing a brand-new fishery? This is a topic that Dagny-Elise Anastassiou, chief impact officer at Ava Ocean and project lead for Ocean Green, spends a good amount of time thinking about as she works to establish a reliable funding stream for kelp restoration efforts in northern Norway.

‘Our kelp forests need long-term support,’ she says, adding that there is more at stake than funding. ‘At the same time, we don’t want to remove anything from the ocean only for it to go to waste. Urchins are not invasive and they are not a pest, even though we do need to reduce their numbers in order to allow kelp to return. And when we do that, we want to make full use of the urchins we take out of the water.’

Working with Ava Ocean, she already has experienced reestablishing a fishery: the tech-fuelled fishing firm was able to use its patented gentle harvester to reopen the Barents Sea scallop fishery after a 30-year closure. 

But the plan for urchins is something different. The goal here is not to supply an existing demand but to create new products that build that demand for the first time – all without losing sight of how vital it is that kelp forests are given the chance to return to northern Norway. This is a key task for the Ocean Green consortium, made up of researchers, engineers and experts from the commercial world that have come together for a whole-value-chain solution to the urchin-kelp challenge.

Examples of some of the areas of interest that researchers are looking at include specific, high-value enzymes found within urchins and the possibility of using harvested urchins as a commercial biostimulant to boost vegetable growth in northern Norway. Even at the smaller scale, people are already doing useful, interesting and beautiful things with urchins. 

Making art

Sara Roosvall’s art is a perfect representation of a small-scale circular economy. Taking an urchin that has been harvested from the seas of northern Norway, dries it and mills it. In this way she can create a pigment – from which comes beautiful seascapes.

Roosvall is not just an artist, but a marine biologist who is currently working with Ocean Green partner NIBIO, where she is studying antioxidants in kelp as part of her master’s thesis. Through this research, she discovered that algae change their levels of antioxidants and pigments as they age. And taking inspiration from other artists online who she saw grinding minerals to make paint, Roosvall experimented with pigments from dried, milled algae before adding urchin water colours to her repertoire too. 

‘You get these wonderful, surprising colours,’ she explains. ‘For example, even though I use green sea urchins, what I get are these beautiful pink and purple tones. With the algae, I’ve made pigments from bladderwrack, which is a green, as well as dulse, which gives these red-brown hues.’

Working with Ocean Green partner Rissa Citizen Science, Roosvall has even run workshops using her urchin and algae paints, bringing her love of art and marine science to the local community. 

Growing mushrooms – or other food

Delphin Ruché, founder and director of Rissa Citizen Science, which spearheads local outreach on behalf of the consortium, has already had his own commercial success using urchins to grow food. 

As well as working on urchin removal and local kittiwake conservation, Ruché used to co-run a successful mushroom farm. Through Tromsopp – sopp is mushroom in Norwegian – Ruché and his team grew and sold shitake, lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms to Tromsø restaurants and supermarkets.

‘Mushrooms are so economical,’ he explains. ‘They require little electricity, no farmland and you can grow them year round. They also help to address local food insecurity and a reliance on fertilisers.’ The Tromsopp mushrooms were grown using waste material collected in the city – coffee grounds, woodchips, eggshells. And for every 1kg of waste, 1kg of mushrooms was being produced. Because Ruché also runs the teams of volunteers that dive to remove urchins from local waters, he gave crushed urchins a try too. ‘We didn’t do anything very scientifically,’ he explains. ‘We didn’t even rinse them. It was just crushed urchins – the juice mixed with shells. And the result was spectacular: it may be the calcium in the shell – one of very few things mushrooms need to grow – but the mushrooms responded really well.’

Eventually the warehouse they used changed owner and Ruché wasn’t able to find a new site for Tromsopp – but he does have plans to continue testing the effects of urchins as a biostimulant, right in Tromsø city center, in collaboration with landscape architects Lo:Le Landskap and other local stakeholders.

‘The plan is to run an experiment on three plots: a control patch, one enhanced with crushed urchins and a third using guano from kittiwakes that we will gather from across the city. We want to bring some positivity into the narrative around sea urchins and kittiwakes in Tromsø,’ he says.

Install them in your kitchen

This might be the most surprising thing we’ve seen someone do with an urchin, but it actually makes perfect – and beautiful – sense. A company on the other side of the world is turning urchins into marble. 

Marblis is the ‘agricultural surfaces brand’ of California-headquartered biodesign lab Primitives. As well as working in biodegradable packaging and other solutions to environmental challenges, the company has a product called Urchinite – a ‘biomarble’ created from sea urchin shells. ‘For architects and designers, it offers a material rich in texture, origin and story – a surface you can trace back to a marine restoration event, one that is about beauty, but also about repair,’ the firm says.

Like Ocean Green efforts to establish an urchin fishery in Norway, Urchinite grew from the impact that an overabundance of purple sea urchins – among other factors – is having in California. More than 96% of northern California’s kelp has vanished over the last decade, leading to biodiversity loss and economic strain across coastal communities. In northern Norway, loss is not quite as high, but at an estimated 80%, it remains one of the most decimated areas of the world for kelp forests. 

‘With Urchinite, we’re not just designing a product, we’re designing a material interface that bridges land and sea – where the construction of a dining table triggers the rewilding of a habitat,’ says Virj Kan, CEO at Primitives, in a statement that also points the possibilities of products like this for restoration. The company says that every 50 units of Urchinite biomarble – created using the calcium carbonate found in urchin shells that is also the main ingredient in marble – has the potential to clear 1.1 acres of purple urchins.