Unusual aquaculture “ranch” in Newport trying to build a business and save kelp beds one urchin at a time

By NOAA Fisheries

NEWPORT — Aaron Huang, a self-proclaimed “kelp nerd,” has always had a passion for seaweed and even eats them every day.

As kelp forests around him vanish, Huang turned to a surprising solution — sea urchin farming.

“My heart and my stomach pointed me towards this career,” says Huang, the co-founder of OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch in Newport. He’s transforming an ecological crisis into a culinary opportunity and restoring kelp forests — one urchin at a time.

Kelp forests are a critical marine ecosystem along the West Coast. They sequester carbon, protect shorelines, and provide habitat for marine life.

Populations of two kelp forest keystone species — sunflower sea stars and sea otters — have declined significantly in recent decades in Oregon. Those predators control the number of sea urchins, and their disappearance has led to a population boom of purple sea urchins.

With fewer predators, the voracious urchin grazers are devouring kelp at unsustainable rates, putting the entire ecosystem at risk. Once urchins have consumed all the kelp in an area, they enter a dormant, starved state, but remain alive and ready to eat any new kelp growth. These areas devoid of kelp and full of urchins are called sea urchin barrens.

Restoration to match the scale of the problem is overwhelming.

“You’re talking billions of urchins along the coast that have to be physically removed,” said Huang. “We are creating a commercial reason to harvest these dormant urchins and proving that aquaculture can work in tandem with kelp forest restoration.”

This problem led Huang and co-founder Brad Bailey to launch OoNee Sea Urchin Ranch, named after the phonetic spelling of uni, the gonads of sea urchin. Their land-based aquaculture pilot is simultaneously restoring a 10-hectare area off the coast of southern Oregon and providing the community with a delicious food source.

Instead of breeding sea urchins, OoNee collects wild, dormant purple urchins from urchin barrens and places them in shoreside aquaculture tanks. After being fed algal-based pellets for eight to nine weeks in this controlled environment, the once-empty urchins are full of rich, sushi-grade uni.

This approach is known as ranching and offers multiple benefits:

• Restores kelp forests by removing urchins;
• Provides a consistently high-quality product for consumers; and
• Supports sustainable seafood markets and economic opportunities along the Oregon coast.

Traditionally, red urchins have been the primary commercial fishery because they are bigger and easier to shuck. However, OoNee is focusing on purple urchins because they are the main species overgrazing the kelp forests.

The process begins with divers who carefully harvest large purple urchins. Divers can collect a few hundred pounds a day, which are transported by boat to the ranch in Newport. The urchins are then cleaned, held in live tanks, and nourished in raceways until they’re ready for processing.

The urchins are shucked next door at the Central Coast Food Web overlooking the upper Yaquina Bay, packed in saltwater trays, and delivered to restaurants in Portland and Seattle. Chefs are serving uni in creative ways, from fresh on the half shell to high-end pasta dishes.

Huang describes how ranching offers consistent texture and taste that isn’t guaranteed with wild harvest. While urchins prefer kelp, they are not picky eaters.

“Urchins are the roombas of the sea,” he says. “They are bottom feeders and eat what’s available to them.”

With increasing instability in their natural ecosystem, there is increasing variability in the quality of wild harvest urchin.

“Some are amazing, some are empty, and some just don’t taste good,” he says. “With ranching, we consistently deliver a sweet, custardy product that tastes like the ocean.”

He compares the flavor of his urchins to that of a really sweet Kumamoto oyster.

And this consistency pays off. The price point of ranched urchins is 20 percent to 30 percent higher than that of wild harvest.

Although OoNee is currently a small operation, selling about 30,000 pounds of urchins annually, Huang has aspirations to scale up into a full commercial facility.

He is collaborating with ReefCheck to validate the impact of their farm and demonstrate a working model for how urchin ranching and ecosystem restoration can go hand-in-hand.

“We want to be a case study for what a regenerative blue economy can look like. We’re proving this can be done in a way that’s profitable, sustainable, and restorative. We’re not just farming sea urchins; we’re restoring an ecosystem that we depend on.”

• To see more stories and news releases by NOAA Fisheries staff on the West Coast, go here