{"id":924745,"date":"2026-10-08T02:20:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T02:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/924745\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T02:20:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T02:20:18","slug":"rare-sea-cucumber-nursery-near-sanikiluaq-nunavut-could-lead-to-commercial-fishery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/924745\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare sea cucumber nursery near Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, could lead to commercial fishery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rare discovery of an undersea nursery with billions of baby sea cucumbers near Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, is helping researchers better understand the species \u2014 and could some day generate income for the Arctic hamlet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Annie Mercier, a professor at the university\u2019s department of ocean sciences, and her team \u2014 guided out on the land by residents of the community \u2014 found the nursery the following year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Arragutainaq said his community hadn\u2019t previously known about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were completely thrilled,\u201d said Mercier.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mercier and her team published a 2023 article<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The baby sea cucumbers are less than two millimeters long and resemble pink specks on the rocks and mussel shells on which they\u2019re found. While the adults are found deep in the water on the ocean floor, Mercier says babies are found closer to the surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She said the nursery is \u201chuge\u201d and probably stretches along the entire coastline of the Belcher Islands archipelago in a band that\u2019s between one to three metres below the ocean surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Annie Mercier and Jos\u00e9phine Pierrat during a research trip to Sanikiluaq in 2024. (Submitted by Jos\u00e9phine Pierrat)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really opened up a lot of investigation avenues and so we were super grateful that we could find this,\u201d said Mercier. \u201cWhen you have the young of the year, you can look at how fast they grow, how do they migrate, do they have changing behaviours?\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

This information is also useful, she said, for management of the species.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘They’re everywhere’<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9phine Pierrat used a small silver spatula to point out sea cucumbers in a pail full of water, mussels and rocks.<\/p>\n

A juvenile on the side of the white bucket was easy to identify \u2014 it\u2019s brown, spiney, and more than an inch long \u2014 but the babies were harder to spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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)<\/p>\n

\u201cThis tiny pink dot? It\u2019s a baby sea cucumber that is less than four months old,\u201d said Pierrat, a postdoctoral researcher at Memorial\u2019s ocean sciences department, gesturing at a speck on a mussel. \u201cWe have plenty of them. One here, here, here, here \u2014 they\u2019re everywhere.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mercier wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are gathering the data with the help of the community \u2026 because they know where the population of sea cucumbers are and they know how to collect them,\u201d said Pierrat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Learning something new<\/p>\n

The association needs the data to make its case to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for a commercial fishery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Arragutainaq said the community was first looking into starting a scallop fishery about 12 or 13 years ago. They\u2019re now considering whether to add sea cucumbers to that fishery as well, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to take a long time, because of all the regulations,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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 Jos\u00e9phine Pierrat)<\/p>\n

Mercier said taking things slow and making sure there\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for how it would benefit his community, Arragutainaq said a fishery would create jobs for residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s something new that we also need to learn,\u201d he said. \u201cIt seems it can work, because it\u2019s a food source.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pierrat said there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Arragutainaq said sea cucumbers can be eaten raw or roasted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s crunchy, salty, that kind of thing. It\u2019s good.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rare discovery of an undersea nursery with billions of baby sea cucumbers near Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, is helping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":924746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-924745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}