Commercial Harvest
In recent years, the sea cucumber industry in Alaska has increased due to increased export of the skins and muscles to China.
In China, sea cucumbers are farmed commercially in artificial ponds. These ponds can be as large as 1,000 acres (400 ha), and satisfy much of the local demand. Wild sea cucumbers are caught by divers and these wild Alaskan sea cucumbers have higher nutritional value and are larger than farmed Chinese sea cucumbers. Larger size and higher nutritional value has allowed the Alaskan fisheries to continue to compete for market share, despite the increase in local, Chinese sea cucumber farming.
One of Australia's oldest fisheries is the collection of sea cucumber, harvested by divers from throughout the Coral Sea in far North Queensland, Torres Straits and Western Australia. In the late 1800s there were as many as 400 divers operating from Cooktown, Queensland. The main target species today are White Teat Fish, Black Fish and Sand Fish, caught by divers in waters as deep as 40 meters.
Read more about this topic: Sea Cucumber
Famous quotes containing the words commercial and/or harvest:
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)