In 1987, Maine lobstermen were fed up with sea urchins. The spiny burrs were filling their traps and gnawing through bait bags and generally being a nuisance, so when the state found a profitable market for urchins, we jumped at the chance. Turns out the Japanese were running out of urchins, one of their favorite kinds of seafood, and our native species could fill the void. For the next five years, the fishery was wide-open and unregulated and the sea was full of food. Fishermen were encouraged to enter the market and make money, and we did. Boxes and boxes of live urchins were shipped to Japan.

During the gold rush days, urchins became the second largest fishery after lobster, with a peak harvest in 1993. Then the urchin population began what would become a steady and steep decline. As the resource became scarce, the government applied more management rules, scientists started researching the animals, and the fishermen began to panic.

You've heard the story. But time has a way of changing how we view our world, and so some stories are worth retelling. The tragedy of the Maine sea urchin fishery is one of these stories.

When the urchins started disappearing, and the free-for-all ended, and the "rodeos of ragtag boats" dispersed, what did we do? We—all of us, creatures of rules and boundaries—knew we had to do something. The gold rush mentality made most of us nervous. We still considered sea urchins pests, and we may have disagreed on how to manage them, but we all agreed it had to be done. Urchin processors, dealers, and harvesters even worked on the first regulations, self-imposed control to ensure future income and stability, passed into law on January 1, 1994.

We created a sea urchin license, season and a minimum harvest size. We banned night dragging. We established a moratorium on new licenses. We placed a "hefty" surcharge on licenses, and put the money in a fund for scientists and managers—over $2 million since 1995. We created a Sea Urchin Zone Council.

With surcharge funds, we started weekly catch sampling. We scrutinized dealer logbooks, and analyzed the global urchin market. We studied urchin biology, population dynamics, behavior, and survival. We tried different drags and dragging techniques. We closed areas to fishing and watched what happened. We tried seeding kelp beds with baby urchins, which were eaten by crabs. We moved urchins to areas with better food supplies. They, too, were eaten by crabs, because without all the urchins the kelp beds had returned, providing shelter for crabs and other urchin predators.

We should have started sooner. All of our rules, councils, and zoning were too late. The sea had shifted to an "alternate stable state."

In 2001 we held a workshop to create plans for reducing landings by 25 percent. In 2002 the workshop evolved into a "summit," at which we evaluated different ways to manage the resource and revised the way research was funded and communicated to industry. At the 2003 summit we discussed how in the heck we were going to cut the harvest by another 30 percent.