Global trade in sea cucumbers ‘alarming’ with many species at risk: Study

The global trade in sea cucumbers has grown since 2013 and continues to decimate the populations of many species, according to a recent study that cites “escalating impacts” and calls for stronger conservation measures.

“Nowadays it’s overexploited nearly all over in the world,” Chantal Conand, an emeritus associate at France’s National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study, told Mongabay, speaking of sea cucumbers generally.

Conand and her co-authors write that the harvest of sea cucumbers is now “contagious” — spreading from place to place — and that the “continued growth and expansion of the global sea cucumber trade is alarming as the sustainability of many species-specific fisheries remains of great concern.”

The paper, which was published Feb. 19 in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, follows other recent sea cucumber studies that also raise conservation concerns.

Diving for good data

Globally, there are roughly 1,800 species of sea cucumbers, which make up all of the taxonomic class Holothuroidea. Like starfish (class Asteroidea) and sea urchins (class Echinoidea), they sit in the phylum Echinodermata.

Sea cucumbers act as recyclers and processors on the seafloor, eating detritus — decaying organic matter — and discharging it in a more aerated, nitrogen-rich form that helps fertilize seagrasses and coral reefs. They’re invertebrate animals with wormlike bodies ranging from 2 centimeters (less than an inch) long to more than 2 meters (about 7 feet).

Conand, who has studied sea cucumbers since the 1980s, said people ask her “‘Why did you study these ugly things?’”

She and her co-authors used 2013-2021 trade and harvest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. They found that global capture of sea cucumbers increased from 81,831 metric tons in 2013 to 123,278 metric tons in 2018, and just below that in 2019. The figure was roughly 97,000 metric tons in both 2020 and 2021, with the drop-off possibly related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study confirms that China’s longtime role in the trade remains central. Sea cucumbers are used in traditional Chinese medicine and consumed as a delicacy on special occasions. China and its special administrative region of Hong Kong are the main importers as measured by dollar value, the study found. Japan, meanwhile, is the leading exporter by value. Canada, where the orange-footed sea cucumber (Cucumaria frondosa) has been harvested industrially since the early 2010s, is also among the leading exporters, the data show.

Steven Purcell, a professor of marine science at Southern Cross University in Australia, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay in an email that it was a “valuable update on sea cucumber fishery captures and trade” and that Conand is “arguably the most experienced and widely regarded sea cucumber specialist in the world.”

The study shows that “sea cucumber fisheries continue to expand to new regions as the older fisheries have faced declines in stocks,” Purcell said.

Purcell co-authored a 2025 study that said there was an “urgent need for action” on sea cucumber conservation, calling the situation “perilous.”

Though overall sea cucumber trade figures haven’t spiked, the market has expanded to include species that were once less sought after, experts say.

“A lot of the recent harvest volume is lower value species that are caught in greater numbers from deep waters,” Purcell said, adding that many tropical, shallow-water species are now hard to find, though they are still opportunistically harvested.

One of the high-value species that’s been heavily overexploited in the northwest Pacific Ocean, including in Chinese waters, is the endangered Japanese sea cucumber (Apostichopus japonicus). The species fetches high prices and has been grown via industrial-scale aquaculture for decades.

“The international market for sea cucumbers is so insatiable that even the spectacular Chinese aquaculture production of the most highly valued species, Apostichopus japonicus, has failed to dampen its prices,” the 2025 study says.

Purcell said that farmed sea cucumbers don’t figure greatly in FAO trade data because China is the main consumer, so the aquaculture products don’t cross borders.

That’s one of many challenges in assessing the scale of the global harvest. Another is the different forms that sea cucumber products now come in. In the past, sea cucumber was typically traded in its dried form and called trepang or bêche-de-mer. Now, frozen or fresh forms are common, making an apple-to-apple weight comparison difficult.

Still another challenge is that customs officials often fail to distinguish between species, making it “impossible to monitor species-specific trends in trade,” as Purcell put it. The FAO is in the process of introducing specific codes that should help remedy this problem, he said.

Much of the sea cucumber harvest in the Global South is done by divers, sometimes using unsafe scuba gear. Declining catches are reported in many areas. Research from the Philippines in 2024 found that small-scale fishers who used to be able to collect 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of sea cucumbers in a few hours a decade earlier were now struggling to get a single kilo (2.2 lbs) in the same time frame.

Conand and her co-authors call for national and international conservation measures, pointing to the addition of some sea cucumber species to Appendix II of CITES, the global wildlife trade convention, in recent years as a start. An Appendix II listing means that trade in such species are, at least in theory, tightly regulated, with permits required for cross-border trade.

Banner image: An orange-footed sea cucumber (Cucumaria frondosa). Image courtesy of Sara Jobson/Mercier Lab. 

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Citations:

Conand, C., Cornet, J., & Lovatelli, A. (2026). Global sea cucumber fisheries: An update for the last decade. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, 106. doi:10.1017/S0025315425101008

Mercier, A., Purcell, S. W., Montgomery, E. M., Kinch, J., Byrne, M., & Hamel, J. (2025). Revered and reviled: The plight of the vanishing sea cucumbers. Annual Review of Marine Science, 17(1), 115-142. doi:10.1146/annurev-marine-032123-025441

Branch, T. A., Lobo, A. S., & Purcell, S. W. (2013). Opportunistic exploitation: An overlooked pathway to extinction. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(7), 409-413. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2013.03.003

Gamboa, R. U., Halun, S. Z., & Vularika, A. S. (2024). Artisanal processing and consumption of sea cucumbers: Stories from the Philippines and Fiji islands. The World of Sea Cucumbers, 123-132. doi:10.1016/B978-0-323-95377-1.00021-7

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