Sea Cucumber - Holothurians As Food and Medicine

Holothurians As Food and Medicine

To supply the markets of Southern China, Macassan trepangers traded with the Indigenous Australians of Arnhem Land. This Macassan contact with Australia is the first recorded example of trade between the inhabitants of the Australian continent and their Asian neighbours.

There are many commercially important species of sea cucumber that are harvested and dried for export for use in Chinese cuisine as Hoi sam. Some of the more commonly found species in markets include:

• Holothuria scabra
• Holothuria fuscogilva
• Actinopyga mauritiana
• Stichius japonicus
• Parastichopus californicus
• Thelenota ananas
• Acaudina molpadioides
• Isostichopus fuscus

Some varieties of sea cucumber (known as gamat in Malaysia or teripang in Indonesia) are said to have excellent healing properties. There are pharmaceutical companies being built based on gamat. Extracts are prepared and made into oil, cream, or cosmetics. Some products are intended to be taken internally. A single study conducted on an unreported number of mice found intraperitoneal injection of sea cucumber extract to be somewhat effective in high doses (100 mg/kg) against internal pain, but ineffective against externally induced pain. Another study suggested that the sea cucumber contains all the fatty acids necessary to play a potentially active role in tissue repair.

On December 21, 2007, a study published in PLoS Pathogens found that a lectin from Cucumaria echinata impaired the development of the malaria parasite when produced by transgenic mosquitoes.