Purple Sea Urchin

The low rocky reef and tidepools on a deep minus tide; you won't have to search. Where the kelp is gone, the purple urchins carpet the rock in a spiny barren, packed shoulder to shoulder. That crowding is the problem: too many mouths, no kelp left to eat, so most sit half-starved and empty. Pass over the beds and hunt the edges, where a few still reach into drifting kelp and fill.

Assume empty until proven full: this is the one urchin where cracking a test animal first is not optional. Most barren purples are 'zombies': light for their size, spines slow or slack, and hollow inside with only a thread of pale, bitter roe. A worth-keeping one is heavy and dense in the hand with lively spines, and cracks open to firm, plump, gold-orange lobes. If the first three you open are empty, that bed is starved; move on rather than fill a bag with shells. Best odds Nov–Mar, and near live kelp.

Smaller and deep violet, spines shorter and blunter than the red urchin (Mesocentrotus franciscanus). The red is the classic uni animal; the purple is the barren-former you thin.

Oregon shellfish license (age 12+). Confirm the current ODFW daily limit for sea urchins before you go.

Take by hand from the low rocky intertidal. Mind the daily limit and confirm the area is open with ODA before you gather.

Same as the red: snip the shell open around the mouth with shears, lift out the five gold lobes, rinse in cold seawater, eat raw the day you gather. The lobes run smaller than a red's: you gather more animals for the same plate, so cull hard for the full ones.