Why Sea Cucumbers Matter More Than You Think

0:00 One of the most important animals in the ocean is something most people never even think about, and we're removing it faster than almost anything else in the world. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekday ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the ocean every weekday, hit that follow button right now so you do not miss tomorrow's story. If you've been following me at all for the last couple of months, you've noticed that I've been doing, like theme weeks. So every week, there's an interview on the Friday, and I take that interview, and I break down the interview so that I prepare you for the interview by doing four solo episodes, Monday to Thursday, every week. This week, we're gonna do something different.

0:40 We're gonna go back to old school How to Protect the Ocean podcast, where it's not really gonna necessarily gonna be themed week. It's just gonna be stuff that I really found interesting and it's gonna be five solo episodes. So Monday to Friday, you're gonna get different episodes, probably about 10 minutes long or so but just covering stories that I find interesting that I wanted to kinda update you on. I'm gonna have more interviews coming soon. I'm conducting two this week. We're gonna go back to our regular programming of four solo episodes with an interview on the Friday. I I hope you enjoy this. Let me know what are you liking. I'm looking forward to doing more of the theme episodes. But for now, we're just gonna try to switch it up and go a little assorted. It's an assorted week this week. And today, we're gonna be talking about sea cucumbers. And today's episode answers really one simple question.

1:22 Why should anyone care about sea cucumbers? That's really the question that I think a lot of people are Because, you know, when you look at a sea cucumber, it doesn't look the most appetizing, let's just say. It looks like a massive worm. They come in a variety of colors, right? They come in black, they come in pink, they go white, they're gray, they're blue. Like, they come in a lot of different colors, but they als- often have, like, detritus all over them. They're part of the echinoderm family, like the starfish family but they don't look anything like a starfish from what you would think. A starfish looks like a star. It has, like, the five sort of limbs, and it looks kinda cool and just kinda cool to pick up. And you have sea stars as well, which have more than five limbs, but they look like starfish. When people say starfish, they look like, "That's really cool." But sea cucumbers are very different but they're very important in the marine ecosystem cause they're, they just pick up stuff.

2:12 They're detritus eaters, meaning they just kinda pick up anything that's on the ground that they can eat on the ocean bottom, and they're kinda really important. And so I want to kinda cover this 'cause there was a recent article on Mongabay News, which we love Mongabay News here on the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. And so I want to cover one of these. The article's looking at how these animals are decreasing because of fishing, 'cause people are eating sea cucumbers. Yes, people eat sea cucumbers, even though they look a little different. So we're gonna talk about that today because I think it's really interesting. I am a big echinoderm fan, so I love starfish, I love sea stars, I love, sea urchins, I love sea cucumbers. I think they're all very, very interesting. It's kind of an interesting thing to cover sea cucumbers because of the fact that they are in demand right now.

2:55 And we have to look out at what's happening, right? Because what's happening to them tells us a lot about how the ocean actually works and how it starts to break down. And so I think that's what we're gonna be talking about today. A new study highlighted by Mongabay is raising concerns about the global trade in sea cucumbers. Because like I said before, demand is rising, and prices are so high for these. And harvesting is happening much faster, and then many of the populations can recover for sea cucumbers. These animals are being collected across tropical regions, often with weak monitoring, limited regulation, and in many cases, illegal trade. When you are capturing these things, it's not like regular fisheries where you put a pole, a rod and pole, or you have a net and you try and pick them up.

3:40 You can just go diving and just pick them up. They're not gonna run from you. They're not gonna sit there and bite you. They're not gonna cause any harm. You have, uh, gloves on. You just pick them up, put them in your net, and you can collect a bunch of them. You do have to be careful because if you kill one of them, they release, like, this toxin out. It's a deterrent to do that. You do have to be careful. But it's really easy to just go snorkeling or go free diving or even go scuba diving and just pick up as many as you can because a lot of times when you see one, you're gonna see a bunch of them. They're not easy to spot, but I'm sure these fishers are going out and they're finding them pretty quickly because it's easy to do that. Most of them are dried and sold as a luxury food product. And while that might sound like a niche issue, it's not really because sea cucumbers are not just another species.

4:23 Sea cucumbers actually act like the ocean's cleanup crew. They sit on the bottom of the ocean, the sea floor, and they process sediment. So essentially, they will go through the sediment with their little filaments that they have, and they go through the sediment, and they pick up all the stuff. They recycle all those nutrients. So all the stuff that goes in, all the crap essentially that is on the bottom of the ocean gets cycled through the sea cucumber, and then it gets recycled as nutrients, which is kinda cool. And they help keep ecosystems stable. So I think that's a really cool thing. They're like a sanitation system or a recycling system. So when you have sea cucumbers that go through an area, they will just kinda go through any kind of, like, ammonia or anything that can cause ammonia, right, as part of the nutrient cycle, and just kinda pick up stuff that gets bad.

5:05 Like, if you ever have an aquarium and you let all the fish poo and everything else, like, sit on the bottom for too long, it breaks down. It can turn into ammonia, you get what's called an ammonia bomb. So all the ammonia stays underneath the sediment, and once that is released, you can actually kill animals from that. And so in the ocean, you can get the same thing, but these animals will go through and they're the janitors. They just kinda clean up the system and it's really cool that they do that. So without them, the sea floor becomes a lot less healthy, and nutrients don't cycle in the same way. That can be a detriment to the ocean floor, the ecosystem and over time, that affects everything from coral reefs to fisheries, and that is something we don't want. But this is the part that people miss. The ocean doesn't run on the animals we pay attention to.

5:48 It runs on the ones we ignore. So it doesn't run on, like, salmon. It doesn't run on cod. It doesn't run on whales. I mean, they all help, and they all contribute in some kind of way. Like, if you've ever heard of whale fall, where whales die, they go to the bottom, they get eaten up. But all those microbes, invertebrates like sea cucumbers and starfish and crabs and lobsters and shrimp and all the different, like, worms that we see, those are the ones we kind of ignore, and those are the ones that really help keep that bottom clean, keep that ocean cycling. And that's really important. And when those species disappear, the ones that we normally ignore, the system doesn't collapse all at once. But it will, eventually. It weakens slowly. Now, I wanna interrupt just a little bit, 'cause if you're getting value from this, these quick ocean updates that we're doing this week, I want you to follow the show.

6:34 Hit that follow, 'cause it helps us reach other people. The whole point of this podcast, from when I started it 11 years ago, was to get in front of people to provide a resource as an ocean news update and a resource for people who want to learn more about the ocean. So hit that follow button, allow us to get to the top of the charts, allow you to get access to five days a week of wonderful podcasts on the ocean. And, yeah, hit the follow button, and you can allow other people to see it as well. Now, so the challenge of these sea cucumbers, this whole sea cucumber issue, is that there's not a lack of knowledge. We know these species are vulnerable, and we know trade is increasing, and we know regulation is also inconsistent.

7:16 But the real issue is governance. When you go back and look at enforcement, it's really difficult to enforce when these sea cucumbers are found all over the place, especially in shallow areas. So If I were somebody on a beach, and I went out snorkeling, just looking at snorkeling, and I just grab like a net, like a bag that's in a form of a net, and I just start packing them in. And then I can go up into the forest, I can go up down the road, and I can sell it to people. It's really easy to do. So it's difficult to enforce. And so the real issue is what I say is governance. There's a global supply chain. So it's harvested in one region and sold in another and monitored poorly across the entire system. So the opportunity is clear.

7:57 We need better tracking of the supply chain, which to be honest, is with a lot of these fisheries, right? We need better tracking. We need to track the entire supply chain. And then when we are able to track the entire supply chain, we need stronger enforcement. And treating these species like critical infrastructure, not just seafood. That's what we need to do. We need to really realize that these species are very important to the ocean and very important to the ocean mechanics. And that's something that we need to start really thinking about the ocean in general is we need to respect how the ocean functions and not just take what we want and expect nothing to happen. ' Cause the ocean doesn't collapse when the big animals disappear.

8:39 It collapses when the small invisible ones do. And that's what we're starting to see, and we don't want this to happen. So with that said, if you see sea cucumber on the menu, make sure it's sustainable, make sure it's monitored. Very difficult to do. Hopefully, we can get to that one day because we know seafood monitoring is a very difficult. But in the meantime, pay attention, stay updated, and keep listening to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast by hitting that follow button. And we would love to be a part of your life and your journey of learning about the ocean and what you can do to protect it. Because this is a podcast that starts a conversation and we want you to continue that. So you can hit me up online at How to Protect the Ocean or at Speak Up for Blue, depending on where you're looking at.

9:21 But also you can just reach out to me any way you feel that you want. If you want to give us feedback, go to speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback. And I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.