Fish & Water - Sounds Wild
Sea Cucumber

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Sea cucumbers

A family is tide-pooling on a minus tide in Southeast Alaska, and they've discovered an odd looking creature. It's a sea cucumber, an aptly named marine animal related to sea stars. About twelve inches long, this orange cucumber-shaped animal has leathery skin and seems like a bag full of water. Although it doesn't look very appetizing, there is an important commercial market for sea cucumbers. There are many species of sea cucumber, but the giant red sea cucumber is the only species commercially harvested in Alaska.

Sea cucumbers crawl slowly across the sea floor, picking up algae and detritus on their tube feet and then transferring the nutrients to their mouths. They really are mostly water - they have no brain and few organs beyond gonads and a digestive tract.

Red sea cucumbers are harvested by divers, who hand pick them off the sea floor in a carefully managed fall fishery. An average red sea cucumber was worth about two dollars in the 2015 commercial season. About 230 divers have permits to harvest sea cucumbers in Alaska, and they harvest about one and a half million pounds a year.

The harvested sea cucumbers are sliced lengthwise and five strips of white meat are scraped off of the inside of the sea cucumber's skin. Each animal yields just a few tablespoons of meat. The skin is boiled and salted, then ground up, and often used as seasoning in Asian soups. Sometimes, the entire animal is boiled and salted. Sea cucumber is popular in Korea as trepang, and is also called sea ginseng. In Japan it's known as namako.