Sea cucumbers are also harvested in many places—including in the Qikiqtait region, where they have been a traditional food for Inuit since time immemorial.

Despite their importance and ubiquity, however, there’s still much that remains unknown about sea cucumbers in general and specifically the ones that live in the Qikiqtait region. Attempting to solve some of these questions is what brought Joséphine to Sanikiluaq earlier this spring alongside a team from the Mercier Lab, where she is working with the local hunters and trappers association, who are collecting knowledge of the benthic community to advance both a small-scale fishery and marine conservation.

Joséphine has long been drawn to overlooked species and ecosystems. She did her master’s degree on seagrass meadows— “I really appreciated it, because it’s not a sexy ecosystem like a coral reef but it is just as important ecologically,” she says—before doing her doctoral research on sea cucumbers around the tropical island of La Réunion (France, Indian Ocean). The waters there are protected and the local people do not harvest them, so it was an opportunity to monitor their populations and see how they were responding to other impacts such as disease and environmental changes. Joséphine also studied their reproductive cycles. “Some species reproduce only sexually, but others can also reproduce asexually,” she explains. “When one individual divides in two, both parts will regenerate, which is very interesting when it comes to maintaining the population.”

Unlike the tropical species found near La Réunion, the sea cucumbers around Sanikiluaq grow more slowly. One of the things that drew Joséphine to the research here was the opportunity to study early juvenile sea cucumbers, which are less than one millimetre long. The waters here are home to one of the first sea cucumber “nurseries” discovered in the world, says Joséphine. “It’s so difficult to find them in the wild due to their tiny size and cryptic behaviour, and in Qikiqtait we are very lucky, because we have access to these juveniles and can learn a lot about their ecology, biology and spatial distribution.”

While the community has long harvested sea cucumbers, seeing the juveniles was a new experience for many and prompted a number of questions. Beyond curiosity, knowing where juvenile sea cucumbers are and how many of them are present is important to help manage the population responsibly. Past research in this area has revealed large juvenile nursery areas, the first to be discovered in the Arctic. It also presents an opportunity to look at how the sea cucumbers here have adapted to their particular circumstances: for example, the juveniles are typically found in shallow water, which means that when the ice thaws in the spring, the salinity in the water is lower. Verifying this in the lab will help researchers and the community understand their tolerance to current and future water conditions.

In addition to studying the juveniles, Joséphine has been looking at the nutritional composition of the adults. The team collected sea cucumbers in three different locations and looked at differences in the protein, lipids, fatty acids, amino acids and vitamins. People in Sanikiluaq also eat sea cucumbers fresh, whereas they’re typically dried for export, which can affect the nutritional content. The results of the research will assist the community in knowing which places are best for local harvesting and which may have the potential for small-scale commercial fishing.