- [Crystal] It has no brain.

It can live for decades.

It devours forests.

But it has one weakness.

It's pretty tasty.

(bones crackle) - It's a complete flavor.

They have a wonderful complexity and they're almost like seasoned to the point of just being ready to eat on their own.

You don't really have to do much to it.

Just don't mess it up, basically, yeah.

(mellow music) - [Crystal] Off the south coast of Oregon, ecosystems are changing and strange creatures are on the rise.

Licensed divers with permits are on the hunt and their target isn't hard to find.

- Dive down and all of a sudden you see all of this dark purple urchins and red and pink ones.

And, so here's an example of this sort of kind of alien creature that is just part of our natural world.

- [Crystal] From the outside urchins might seem a bit basic.

They're pretty but they kind of just sit there and poke things.

But those spikes hide a delicious secret.

Not many predators want to bother with spiky things which means urchins can spend their days slowly moseying on their tiny tube feet, chowing on seaweed.

But in spring, when mating season rolls around, being slow and spiky, well it isn't the best way to find a partner.

So once a year, urchins broadcast their eggs and sperm into the water and hope for the best.

It's not the most efficient process but it works surprisingly well.

And evolution has helped out by giving them a strange body plan that lets them have not just one reproductive organ, but five.

And those five tender gonads, brined in Pacific saltwater for years, those are the parts we eat.

- Don't scratch your boat.

- So when you go to the sushi bar and you order uni, what you're ordering is a sea urchin gonad.

My early experiences with uni were in sushi bars where it had been processed in a certain way and I didn't find it super appealing.

But as soon as I tasted the fresh uni, you know right out of the urchin, I was hooked.

- [Crystal] This is what fresh uni can be, a hit of richness that can transform even the most familiar dish, - When my brain thought of uni or utilizing uni and I compared it to eggs and butter.

It kind of feels in texture-wise of like a sea cow tongue, but it breaks down really quick and it's super fatty so.

- [Crystal] Coastal Oregon chefs like Christian Gomez are trying out new uni dishes.

This one has uni cream sauce, uni topping and uni foam.

Chefs are experimenting because there's a lot of sea urchins around these days.

Licensed Oregon urchin divers pull in about half a million pounds a year.

All of that harvest has been red sea urchins but their cousins, the purples, have been multiplying.

Their numbers are up 10,000% in recent years.

Good news for adventurous chefs but possibly a bad sign for the environment.

Urchins eat kelp and have good defenses but a few clever creatures like sea otters and sunflower sea stars know how to get around those spikes and that keeps urchins from eating all of the kelp.

It's a situation that evolved to be stable.

- We have this system that is in balance and it is balancing on these sort of key pillars of the system.

The kelp, historically the otter, the sea star, the urchin, these are the key players.

But you take away these sort of pillars that are supporting that balanced ecosystem and it starts to wobble.

- [Crystal] First, over a century ago, fur trappers decimated Oregon's sea otter population.

More recently, climate change has led to warming waters which has weakened kelp and helped disease devastate sea stars.

- We've got a loss of predators and then you have a big population boom of purple sea urchins.

- [Crystal] What is good for urchins can be bad for kelp forests, which provide safety and food for a wide array of marine species.

Hoardes of urchins roaming the sea floor have turned many underwater forests into wastelands.

- So we have this complicated problem.

We got to come at it from many different angles.

What do you do if you have these purple sea urchins that are really not the target of the market?

And then we started to think about, well, what would happen if we could take some of these purple sea urchins, bring them ashore and feed them to fatten up their uni.

- [Crystal] That's exactly what coastal entrepreneurs are trying.

Fattening up wild urchins in tanks takes pressure off kelp forests and makes purple sea urchins more attractive to the dining public.

- This is a Seaweed Farm in Bandon, Oregon, right near the ocean.

The Port Bandon partnered with a company called Oregon Dulse.

We have the food source here potentially to be able to take urchins and rear them for eight to 10 weeks until they're marketable so they're ready for restaurants and the public to actually take part in them.

- To me, it just tastes like the ocean, like the most pure essence of it, essence of umami and the kelp that it eats.

So we take sourdough bread from Ken's Artisan and it's just griddled.

And then we make a butter here from some local cream and then we like lightly smoke the cream.

And then we put the urchin tongues that are cleaned on top of that.

And then the sauce is made with egg yolks and a sort of like a white soy sauce tamari that's made from a miso that we make with Dutch bullet beans.

And it definitely works as a dish 'cause the textural contrast of the bread, the butter, it's like this classic Italian concept of like three fats balancing each other out.

Just putting it on the menu, making it something that people see more often they start to recognize it.

So I think that the chef's role is super important because that's how the market for it starts on the consumer level.

- [Crystal] Realistically, we can't eat our way out of this situation.

One study estimated that there are 350 million purple sea urchins off the coast of Port Orford alone but we humans are learning a new role, part caretaker part predator in a coastal ecosystem searching for balance.

(eerie music) - So now you've got these urchins just marauding and eating all the kelp and it doesn't, and before long, okay, I have to pause here and notice there's an whale right there.

(chuckles) It's a gray whale.

It just surfaced.

- Yeah, I saw it.

- About 20 feet away from us there.

(Tom chuckles)