Potential and Challenges for the Sea Cucumber Fisheries with Special Emphasis on Their Effective Utilization and Trade

Abstract

Sea cucumbers belonging to the phylum Echinodermata are important marine invertebrates, generally occur in the sandy substrates, and rocky shores near the bottom of sea. This review work has been attempted to make an interlink between biological and socio-economical perspectives of sea cucumber because of the high demand in the present world. The outside body part of sea cucumber (beche-de-mer) is known to act as a defense and has been recognized for making secondary metabolites including vitamins and triterpenoid glycoside saponins that have profound ecological and pharmaceutical significance. Due to higher pharmaceutical, cosmeceutical and nutraceutical values, sea cucumber has become one of the most essential products and it has fetched higher foreign market prices and therefore, provide a significant earnings source and employment opportunity to the coastal communities in many countries. Sea cucumbers are also used to remove arthritis pain, exert wound healing, and in the present days, are utilized in human health therapeutics and Asian folk medicine. The sea cucumber and its product have been considered to be the excellent bioresource in the invertebrate fishery, whose harvestings, transporting, handlings, processing and maintenance are easy, convenient and do not need any special technique, procedure and equipment. After processing, the shelf-life of sea cucumber can be maintained for long times. Archaeologically, beche-de-mers were harvested from the multi-species capture fishery and stored for long times for selling to the businessmen and traders directly on the site. As like other lucrative and expensive food items (viz., fish-maws, shark-fins and abalones are taken into the account as one of the valued products in the world seafood markets. Nevertheless, beche-de-mer product supply in the South-East Asian countries has been decreasing day by day because of unstrained harvesting and overexploitation. On the other hand, the marketing structure in these countries is typically ineffective and the marketing networks are multifaceted. Due to the lack of proper information, fishermen are usually not getting proper prices and exact values from the sea cucumber products, whereas other distributors and value-chain members have made complex systems, which have led to high cost of this product. However, the sea cucumber products will still have higher possibility of trading throughout the world markets that might eventually contribute to the global economy in a very worthwhile and significant manner.