Kai Ora
Kai means food. I love it already! It’s summer and kaimoana or seafood is on the menu. There’s nothing like it, no fish shop anywhere saving sales from right off the boat when it arrives in from the catch can compare with the smell and taste of fresh sea food. My nephew Simon has taken to free diving, that is, no breathing apparatus is used. The hot summer weekends have provided him just the right incentive for becoming proficient in the age old art of hunting and collecting.
He’s brought me 2 kina and four paua. They were just divine. “New Zealand’s native kina are a unique species of sea urchin and are culturally important for Mäori. There is a small domestic market for kina which are commercially fished throughout New Zealand. It is also a popular species for recreational fishers. The Quota Management System (QMS) was introduced in New Zealand in 2002.
The QMS monitors stocks and catches, allowing the Government to set Total Allowable Catch (TAC) limits for individual species, to ensure the sustainability of New Zealand’s fisheries. The QMS allocates quotas which provide the right to harvest the species in perpetuity. These rights can be bought, sold or leased, allowing the creation of asset values for this resource.
Kina, also known as sea urchin, resemble a curled-up green hedgehog, they have a nearly spherical shell (or test) protecting their internal organs. Projecting from the shell are long and short movable spines and tube feet. Its mouth, on the underside, it contains a five-sided limy structure known as ‘Aristotle’s lantern’. This acts like a set of jaws and teeth, grinding up food into digestible pellets.
These small creatures (5–10 centimetres in diameter) are endemic to New Zealand, found on shallow water reefs from the Three Kings Islands to the Snares, and around the Chatham Islands. They spawn from November to March, and have a free-swimming larval stage that lasts for up to 3 months. They can live for 20 years or more. They are important members of rocky reefs.
They’re omnivores but prefer to eat large brown seaweeds, especially the common kelp Ecklonia radiata. Their fearsome spines afford some protection from predators, but small kina are no match for large rock lobsters, snapper or the seven-armed starfish. They are found on rocky shores around New Zealand and sub-Antarctic Islands up to depths of 50m, although the largest concentrations are found in water less then 10m deep. While similar species exist elsewhere kina are only found around New Zealand. They are mostly caught by breath-holding dives, although there is some target dredging.
Kina are an echinoderms. During early summer their five sets of sex glands become very swollen. These are the highly prized kina roe, traditionally eaten raw by Māori. Some 600–700 tonnes of wild kina are commercially harvested each year, most being sold on the domestic market. In Japan where top-quality roe sells for $NZD500 a kilogram it’s no small wonder aquaculturalists want to farm them. At the moment the quality of wild roe is variable, some can be bitter or brown and a reliable export market has yet to be developed. Scientists have started raising kina in aquaculture facilities to investigate whether different diets enhance growth or roe quality.
Kina is a wonderful delicacy in moderation, it’s very rich and is a wonderful source of iron rich minerals however, eaten to excess it can leave you with gout. Or so it always seemed to me. So many of my uncles suffered from gout I was almost put off eating kina for that reason alone. However, common sense has prevailed. I understand what gout is now!
The disease is caused by the deposition of sodium urate (uric acid) crystals in the joints. Uric acid is a by-product of the body’s metabolism. Normally the uric acid is removed when urinating, but among patients with a predisposition for gout, the uric acid accumulates in the blood. Among some of these patients, the concentration in the blood is so high that the uric acid ‘overflows’ and settles in the joints and possibly in the skin.
The are two kinds of gout. Primary hyperuricaemia and gout. Hyperuricaemia means an increased level of uric acid in the blood. It is usually caused by an hereditary abnormality in the system that changes the nucleic acid into uric acid. In this case the body is incapable of excreting uric acid fast enough even during normal circumstances.
Secondary hyperuricaemia and gout is caused by another disease or because of consumption of certain medicines (eg diuretic preparations, which increase the output of urine, and acetylsalicylic acid derivatives including aspirin). In these cases, the problem is that the body produces such large quantities of uric acid that the kidneys cannot keep up.
Studies were conducted by P. Klemp, S. Stansfield, B. Castle, and M Robertson at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Rotorua to determine the current prevalence of hyperuricaemia and gout in New Zealand Maori and Europeans for comparison with previous studies. The bottom line determined that gout is on the increase in New Zealand among but Maori and European men and women. It featured significantly among Maori men.
Now with kina stock improvements in aquaculture looking like the ‘next best thing’ and a $NZD3m carrot dangling overhead I was interested to see what the aquaculture Industry and Biotechnology boys would come up with because for some unfathomable reason I still can’t shake the nagging correlation between seafood and my uncles and gout!
NIWA’s (National Institute of Water and Atmosphere) collaboration with Kiwi firm Sea Urchin New Zealand (SUNZ) has led to improvements in the quantity and quality of kina (sea urchin) roe, giving fishers a better income from the same number of animals. Roe yields in wild-caught kina have been consistently doubled by feeding them a protein-rich diet developed by NIWA from fishing by-product.
Now to a complete and utter novice like me I can see and hear a BIG ol’ Kathy Najimy ‘HULLO’ just waiting in the wings to jump right out and scare me into thinking straight on this one! You see, I know gout attacks are brought on by several factors including the one that warns people against foods with a high content of protein and purines such as liver, kidneys, sardines AND seafood. AAAHA!
You see “the kina are held in either land-based tanks or sea-cages for 10–12 weeks and are fed on kelp (their natural food) for the last 5–7 weeks to improve taste. Commercial-scale sea trials in the Marlborough Sounds showed that the switch from land-based to sea-based operations hugely reduced infrastructure costs and reduced labour and feeding costs by about 80%.” SUNZ representatives say the roe taste was also greatly improved.
It’s about moderation isn’t it! It has to be because Klemp, Stansfield et al weren’t just eating their lunch on Hospital time. Gout is on the increase in New Zealand among both Maori and European men and women. It featured significantly among Maori men. Moderation.
