Ocean Green project brings together diverse minds to get creative on urchin-kelp challenge

"An urchin does not want to be removed from its rock or it’s place on the sea floor," states Terje Stokkevåg, senior R&D engineer with Ava Ocean and one of the brains behind a tool that has already revolutionised scallop fishing and that is now being adapted to solve Northern Norway’s urchin problem.

This might seem like an obvious statement but is just one of the many challenges that engineers, trying to remove millions of these creatures, must grapple with.

Stokkevåg talks of having to ‘get inside the mind of an urchin and think like an urchin.’ What is also apparent is that you have to think outside the box.

The Ocean Green project is a diverse consortium and what Stokkevåg and the other engineers bring is a diversity of thinking, married up with experts on conservation, restoration, fisheries and more.

Stokkevåg example, came to Ava Ocean and came to the world of scallops, urchins and kelp restoration not from an ocean-going role but from something drastically different: the Texas oil and fracking industry. What’s clear is that his experience in R&D – an area the UN says is hugely underfunded around ocean projects – means he sometimes takes an unusual route to his goal. For example, Stokkevåg talks of having employed ‘a helicopter engine and the world’s largest hydraulic power pack’ in his fracking work and, while his passion for a far greener project is clear, his ingenuity remains as crucial to its success as before.

So what is his approach to urchin removal? "You have to have a game plan," he says, talking about the things you might expect – 3D printers and scale tanks – to the far-less expected: dump trucks to hand mixers.

He is Doc Brown from Back to the Future, working through any way to harvest urchins in order to restore kelp for future generations.

It must work at 100%

He has weighted ‘urchins’ made from a type of rubber that, in the last round of testing, could be harvested at a rate of around 70% by their scale model tool. But for him, that’s not enough. "The goal is to make it 100% in a controlled environment," he explains. "Once you have that in the aquarium, and it is as good as possible, that is when you take it out into mother nature – because that’s where you’re going to face the real obstacles."

These obstacles come in many forms. They might be predictable – "managing the GPS-controlled positioning of the vessel to the impact of its thrusters and how water currents might shift the harvester". Then there are also the potential for challenges that you haven’t fully anticipated. "You need to be prepared for everything – including all the things that won’t happen," he says.

A meeting of minds

Of course, if the goal was simply to remove the urchins that have grazed down kelp forests to urchin barrens covering an estimated equivalent of one million football fields, that would be a less complicated task.

But while the spotlight is on the urchin at the moment, Ocean Green is about much more than establishing a fishery and the economic force that a circular economy can provide. The project is ultimately about kelp.

"We need to keep focus on the fact that what we’re trying to do here is restore the kelp forests that used the thrive here," says Dagny-Elise Anastassiou, chief impact officer at Ava Ocean, whose job it is to oversee the consortium and make sure that, as urchins are gathered, processed and turned into economically viable products, the surrounding environment remains undamaged and allowed to flourish.

"This is about bringing back biodiversity," she explains. "We know we’ll see an abundance of life return once the kelp is allowed to grow back on these barrens," adds Anastassiou, "but that is a challenge in itself. We need to make sure that, by harvesting these urchins, we do not damage the ecosystem, that we do not further impact the local biodiversity. Together with engineers like Terje, we need to monitor and assess the impact of the urchin removal process."

And that means that, even as the urchins cling to their spot in the barren and Stokkevåg uses his ingenuity to get inside the mind of these spiky, voracious creatures and remove them in their millions, it must all be done with delicacy and balance – with kelp and biodiversity in mind as well.