Sea urchin has gone from being a secondary species to becoming a product with such high demand that it has forced the guilds to develop exploitation plans that ensure the sustainability of this resource. And both the national market, which discovered the intensity of its flavor, and the high export rates of this echinoderm, have caused the number of tons extracted annually and its price at the market to skyrocket. In this context, both the research community and the guilds themselves have committed to developing plans to improve its cultivation, both from the point of view of reproduction and the repopulation of the banks. One of the latest projects approved is Ocimer, an initiative of the Toralla Marine Sciences Station for the optimization of the integral cultivation of the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus (Lamarck, 1816). With a duration of two years and a total budget of €148,420, the project is part of the Pleamar call, promoted by the Biodiversity Foundation, an entity that finances 70% of the total costs, thanks to funds from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF). The activity is co-financed by the FEDER/FSE Galicia 2014-2020 Operational Programme.
At the head of Ocimer is the director of Ecimat, Jose Manuel García Estévez, together with Damián Costas, head of the Biological Resources and Marine Cultures Unit at Ecimat and Estefanía Paredes, researcher in the EcoCost group at CIM-UVigo and head of the Functional Preservation Service of Marine Organisms at Ecimat. He explains that the purpose of this project is to optimize the integral cultivation of sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus to promote fishing and aquaculture sustainability as well as the conservation of biodiversity. The project will work in three main areas. On the one hand, explains Paredes, one of the lines of work is “oriented to hatcheries and repopulation in fishing extraction areas, for which we have the Fishermen’s Brotherhood of San José de Cangas as a partner”. Another objective is to analyze the diets and cultivation conditions of the sea urchin to improve the quality of the gonads with the consequent increase in added value in the market. Finally, a third leg that concerns the project researchers is the conservation of sea urchin biodiversity in the surroundings of the Atlantic Islands National Park and the Vigo estuary as an area of influence where cryopreservation protocols will be developed for several local species of urchin that will be stored in the Ecimat biobank.
Three lines of research
Regarding repopulation, the project team will seek the most effective and least harmful methods for the urchins and will carry out preliminary studies on the natural composition to be repopulated and the interactions between the species that are part of it, in order to assess the potential impacts of repopulation on the pre-existing ecosystem. To develop this repopulation process, the scientific staff will also previously design marking systems by carrying out tests with urchins with variable head diameters to determine the optimal size and the best marking methodology. Within this same line of work, survival and recapture rates will also be analyzed, compiling data on the marked urchins.
Another part of the project will focus on the breeding and pre-fattening process. Thus, on the one hand, the research team will try to optimize the production process of Paracentrotus lividus juveniles with a view to the two most critical moments of this sea urchin cultivation process: the hatchery stage and the fixation-metamorphosis stage. Another part of the work in this line involves the creation of a biobank of native species. As Estefanía Paredes explains, Pleamar aims to “develop protocols for cryopreservation of biological and reproductive material of different local sea urchin species”, so that they will become part of the biobank of marine organisms that Ecimat and the Marine Research Center already have. For this study, the researchers will focus on three species: Sphaerechinus granularis, Paracentrotus lividus and Echinocardium cordatum.
Finally, the third line of research involves designing energy diets that improve the condition, texture and color of hedgehog gonads in the natural environment before their commercialization. To this end, a sensory analysis of the gonads of hedgehogs fed the different diets will be carried out to determine which is the best.
At the end of the project, the team will create a comprehensive manual for the cultivation of Paracentrotus lividus and they hope to publish the results in international scientific journals. All the progress that is made can be followed through social networks at @ocimerUvigo.
