Okay, yeah I was trying to grab your attention. That title is not meant to offend anyone okay? Lol, I mean if you like eating Sea Cucumbers okay sure keep eating it but if you don't know the global implications of eating/buying it then wasting it, read on.
♦ What's a Sea Cucumber? ♦
A sea cucumber (scientific name Holothuria) looks like a slug, but hey, it's not a sea slug but it is commonly called one due to the resemblance.1 Check out how it looks like!
(source)
Would you eat that? I wouldn't. I mean I did get to taste a small sea cucumber once last year and I have thought of a better way to commercialize it since then. Who knows it might bring an added boom to the sea cucumber business but no, I think I won't say it anymore unless they find a way to propagate it further with no problem. Haha. Poor sea cucumbers. Will tell you more below.
Anyway, these spiny worm looking creatures are herbivorous animals - it's not a plant, people! (Ah I have been mislead by it's name too when I first heard of it.) It'd probably be like a snail if it had a shell on it's back but heck they're not related at all to each other! It is an Echinoderm and not to be classified under Gastropoda2 (Doesn't that sound superheroish? Lol.) because it is not a snail and does not have a shell but it is spiny skinned,3 thus an echinoderm.
♦ The Importance of Sea Cucumbers and Spoon Worms ♦
(source)
The penis fish (Korean: Gaebul) as discussed in my previous post is basically a marine spoon worm that lives in marine or brackish water much like a sea cucumber, the only difference is it burrows in the sand. Another similarity is the sea cucumber is also soft bodied4 but it has a spiny exoskeleton.
The Chinese have long been eating the so-called sea slugs because of the supposed aphrodisiac qualities.5 Meanwhile the Koreans eat Gaebul too for it's supposedly aphrodisiac qualities.
Both of these creatures are deposit feeders,6 meaning they consume organic particles in sediments because they live in and/or on the seabed.7
These two species are responsible for bioturbation, or the process of reworking soils and/or sediments of the sea beds.8 This process is very important to change the nutrients in sea sediments, shelter animals like them and removes carbon and increases oxygen. Doing that helps improve biodiversity.
These sea animals are some of the reasons why there is biodiversity. And biodiversity gives us humans and other earthly life forms more food variety and/or medicinal sources and helps prevents extinction of various natural resources etc.9
So extinction of these deposit feeders can lead to extinction of other marine life which in turn will affect human life because fishermen will find lesser catch or main sources of income. C'mon people, we humans are voracious eaters. We are also the most wasteful kind of life form, not to mention we are the worst polluters of our planet!
(ProjectManhattan via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
Do you know how many of those processed sea animals go to waste? When harvested legally or illegally and if any get damaged, these animals aren't returned back to the sea, most just get tossed in the trash can if not processed as something else! Do you think when sea cucumber meals are served to guests like in weddings, the people eat everything? No! They get thrown away unless the food are given to dogs or cats or caterer employees and wedding guests/family members. Otherwise I don't think the food is consumed at all! What's the use of it being harvested from the ocean floor and doing it's important sea function if it all goes to waste because, oh I dunno, some people just don't/can't eat it!?!
Those sea cucumbers are better off in the ocean floor than being harvested for profit and then facing extinction! What will you Holothuria harvesters profit off from then?
Without deposit feeders like the various sea cucumbers our oceans will be acidic and thus it will probably kill more ocean animals like corals and small fishes etc. What will the big fishes eat then? What will we eat when the big fishes are gone? Soylent green anyone?
♦ What must be done to save Sea Cucumbers? ♦
Here are some suggestions on what can be done to keep these sea animals from extinction.
1 Eat Spoon Worms instead.
Hey you want a supposed aphrodisiac that looks phallic then eat penis fish instead! As mentioned above, both of them are deposit feeders so more or less they have the same good nutrients you're looking for in the getting extinct Sea Cucumbers. People should stop harvesting sea cucumbers already or produce them like in fish ponds instead.
There are no reports of spoon worm extinction yet plus they are chewy as opposed to gelatinous Holothuria so maybe you'd like that like you like squid? Hehe.
2 Aquaculture: Rotational harvesting10 or do sea cucumber ranching
(source)
As crops are rotationally harvested on land, so we can also do this to harvest various sea cucumbers. Personally I think it is better to do sea cucumber ranching or aquaculture because over harvesting and overexploitation of these important sea creatures suck! Hawaii even had to ban harvesting of these creatures because of over harvesting! I'm sure (and I hope) there are other areas in several countries who does that too.
The University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute (MSI) has been spearheading this sea ranching method in our country and has been successful so far unless a typhoon happens to hit the location11. They started this because the fish population in an area started to decline. See I told you! But it's all good now because the benefit and proceeds all goes to the sea-side communities involved with it.
I wish I can enroll to a masteral in MSI but my GWA for natural sciences and math is 4 points too shy of the requirement. Huhu. Blame it on my Arki (architecture) major subjects. (Still waiting on a reply email though so stay tuned!)
Anyway, Japan and China have been successful in their sea cucumber hatcheries and sea ranching and pond culture for centuries or decades (?)12 so I think this should be better off applied in other places in the Philippines and other countries too where they harvest sea cucumbers for a living. The Philippines is the Top 513 in being a mega biodiverse country in the world so this should definitely be applied in our coastal areas. No better place than be a marine scientist than here in our country too! Oh as long as the funds for important projects and experiments don't dwindle that is. Haha.
3 Find a way to not waste the cooked sea cucumbers when you encounter some!
(source)
PLEASE DO NOT WASTE THE SEA CUCUMBER AS FOOD WHEN YOU ENCOUNTER IT! It might not be important to you now but it will be several years from now. It's like saving money. If you save more money, you will have, what? Retirement money or whatever, you'll supposedly be rich with. If you deplete these sea cucumbers at an alarming rate then guess what happens? It will be extinct! And when it becomes extinct, then what happens? Soylent green? FTS.
I am definitely guilty of this the first time I got served a sea cucumber meal. I was even excited I was going to finally eat it for the first time. Unfortunately when I researched about this poor creature that's when the guilt hit me. Huhu. I only ate a bite of it and that's it. Oh I'm afraid to ask my cousin what they or the caterers did to the leftover food after their wedding.
♦ Sea Cucumber Funnies and Trivia!!! ♦
Okay, semi-rant over. I'll give you something funny + trivias but do not forget what you learned today, puhleeeze!
• These sea creatures are related to star fishes and sea urchins. Yes believe it! Those sea animals are echinoderms too!
• When attacked, sea cucumbers expel their innards + toxic substances.14 Eeeew. All expelled organs will be regenerated in 1.5 to 5 weeks though so that's good to know, right? This can make them somewhat dangerous too.
• Do you know that some fishes use big sea cucumber's butt hole as a house? OMG!!! Lololol. Watch this.
So if you don't let these animals grow the size of that one in the video, guess where the other fishes will take shelter eh? What with the coral reefs dying off because of sea acidity. Illegal sea cucumber harvesters should think about that!
Have any more sea cucumber trivia? Share away!
Now do you think you should eat more penis fish instead and save those sea cucumbers for another day if you like eating them? Somebody ought to translate this into Chinese and Japanese too. Lol.
That's all for today and do share what you think in the comments. :D
XOXO,
@artgirl
Sources: a-z-animals.com • Wikipedia: Gastropoda, Sea Cucumber, Benthos • tolweb.org • jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu • Britannica • int-res.com • Globalissues.org • scidev.net • thefishsite.com Sea cucumber ranching, Japanese sea cucumber culture • rankred.com • softschools.com
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