The rare discovery of an undersea nursery with billions of baby sea cucumbers near Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, is helping researchers better understand the species — and could some day generate income for the Arctic hamlet.
Lucassie Arragutainaq, the manager of the Sanikiluaq Hunters and Trappers Association, said his community eats small, young sea cucumbers regularly. The bigger adult sea cucumbers, however, could be marketed to China and Japan.
Interested in the possibility of adding the species to plans for a commercial scallop fishery, the association invited scientists from Memorial University in Newfoundland to come study Cucumaria frondosa, also known as the Orange-footed sea cucumber, back in 2018.
Annie Mercier, a professor at the university’s department of ocean sciences, and her team — guided out on the land by residents of the community — found the nursery the following year.
Arragutainaq said his community hadn’t previously known about it.
Lucassie Arragutainaq, the manager of the Sanikiluaq Hunters and Trappers Association, said his community eats small, young sea cucumbers regularly. The bigger adults of the species, however, could be marketed to China and Japan. (Liny Lamberink/CBC)
“We were completely thrilled,” said Mercier.
Mercier said there are about 1,800 species of sea cucumbers in the world, and the nursery grounds of all of them are poorly known. That’s because the animals are cryptic, she said, meaning they’re hard to find.
Mercier and her team published a 2023 article in the peer-reviewed journal Polar Science about the nursery on the coastline near Sanikiluaq, describing it as the first time a Cucumaria frondosa nursery had been discovered.
The baby sea cucumbers are less than two millimeters long and resemble pink specks on the rocks and mussel shells on which they’re found. While the adults are found deep in the water on the ocean floor, Mercier says babies are found closer to the surface.
She said the nursery is “huge” and probably stretches along the entire coastline of the Belcher Islands archipelago in a band that’s between one to three metres below the ocean surface.
Annie Mercier and Joséphine Pierrat during a research trip to Sanikiluaq in 2024. (Submitted by Joséphine Pierrat)
“It really opened up a lot of investigation avenues and so we were super grateful that we could find this,” said Mercier. “When you have the young of the year, you can look at how fast they grow, how do they migrate, do they have changing behaviours?”
This information is also useful, she said, for management of the species.
Joséphine Pierrat used a small silver spatula to point out sea cucumbers in a pail full of water, mussels and rocks.
A juvenile on the side of the white bucket was easy to identify — it’s brown, spiney, and more than an inch long — but the babies were harder to spot.
A juvenile sea cucumber on the side of a bucket containing an assortment of rocks, mussels and other creatures harvested by researchers in Sanikiluaq in September. (Liny Lamberink/CBC)
“This tiny pink dot? It’s a baby sea cucumber that is less than four months old,” said Pierrat, a postdoctoral researcher at Memorial’s ocean sciences department, gesturing at a speck on a mussel. “We have plenty of them. One here, here, here, here — they’re everywhere.”
Mercier wasn’t on this particular trip to Sanikiluaq but four members of her team, including Pierrat, were. On a Sunday in mid-September, they were inside the Qikitait Centre studying samples they retrieved from the choppy water a few days earlier.
The centre is home to the Sanikiluaq Hunters and Trappers Association (HTA) and the Arctic Eider Society, and also has lab space and an accommodation earmarked for scientists like Pierrat.
Qikiqtait, home to the Arctic Eider Society and the Sanikiluaq Hunters and Trappers Association. It’s where researchers from Memorial University studied samples from the ocean floor, containing sea cucumbers and other creatures. (Liny Lamberink/CBC)
“We are gathering the data with the help of the community … because they know where the population of sea cucumbers are and they know how to collect them,” said Pierrat.
“And after, we go back to the lab and we study them, measure them, weigh them, make some dissections, and we collect some data that, after, we share with the HTA.”
The association needs the data to make its case to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for a commercial fishery.
Arragutainaq said the community was first looking into starting a scallop fishery about 12 or 13 years ago. They’re now considering whether to add sea cucumbers to that fishery as well, he said.
“It’s going to take a long time, because of all the regulations,” he said.
A photo of a time lapse camera, surrounded by sea cucumbers and sea urchins, that the research team used to capture footage of life on the ocean floor. (Submitted by Joséphine Pierrat)
Mercier said taking things slow and making sure there’s careful management in the future is a good thing. Lots of sea cucumber fisheries around the globe get quite depleted, and have a poor record of sustainability, she explained.
As for how it would benefit his community, Arragutainaq said a fishery would create jobs for residents.
“It’s something new that we also need to learn,” he said. “It seems it can work, because it’s a food source.”
Pierrat said there’s an opportunity for a dual market: bigger adult sea cucumbers can be processed and dried and sold to other markets, while the younger ones, eaten whole, can be consumed locally.
Arragutainaq said sea cucumbers can be eaten raw or roasted.
“It’s crunchy, salty, that kind of thing. It’s good.”
