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title: ""Once sea urchins have grazed kelp forests down to bare rock, they go…"
date: 2020-06-25
source: facebook
type: Archer T. Ships shared a link.
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# "Once sea urchins have grazed kelp forests down to bare rock, they go…

*June 25, 2020 · Facebook*

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[https://www.theexplorer.no/stories/ocean/how-norwegian-research-can-rescue-the-seabed-from-sea-urchins/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=The_Explorer_2020_ocean_seafood](https://www.theexplorer.no/stories/ocean/how-norwegian-research-can-rescue-the-seabed-from-sea-urchins/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=The_Explorer_2020_ocean_seafood){target="_blank"}
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\"Once sea urchins have grazed kelp forests down to bare rock, they go into starvation mode, a dormant state where they stop reproducing and can live for years without food. The roe in these "dead" urchins shrivels up, making them commercially worthless. Therefore the researchers at Nofima set out to develop a feed that can revive dormant urchins. James say this involved tackling quite a few biological challenges, but he and his colleagues succeeded in the end.\
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"In addition to providing the nutritional requirements of sea urchins, the feed had to stay stable in seawater for up to two weeks to give the urchins time to absorb the nutrients. We also worked to optimise the composition of the feed to create a rapid increase in the quantity and quality of roe in the sea urchins."\
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Nofima's breakthrough made it theoretically possible to create commercially viable products from sea urchin barrens. But just because something is theoretically possible, does not mean that it is a scalable solution. This is where a Japanese-Canadian entrepreneur living on the western coast of Norway comes into the picture.\
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When Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda established Urchinomics in 2016, he had one objective: restore the world's kelp forests with a self-financing business model. His thinking was that if he could create a business out of reviving sea urchins, the world's kelp forests would more or less restore themselves.\
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Takeda's first challenge was to create a product that would actually sell.\
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"Although we had a type of feed that would revive the sea urchins, the quality of the urchins was not good enough for the market. Therefore our first priority was to develop a type of feed that would give us tasty urchins," he said.\
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Takeda obtained the rights to distribute and further develop Nofima's feed. From his office in Ulsteinvik, Norway, he put together an international team of Norwegian and Dutch researchers. In collaboration with the Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi, the researchers developed a feed that yielded delectable urchin roe -- without using animal ingredients, hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, GMO, or ingredients such as soy that are often associated with destruction of the rainforest.\"
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