To Asians they're delicious and sexually arousing, to fishermen they're lucrative, but to the casual swimmer in the average Pacific lagoon they look like feces -- the same shape, black, and just lying there.
But Asian eating habits are now endangering these animals, known as beche-de-mer, sea cucumber or in Chinese hai-shen (sea ginseng), of the family holothuria.
With a world trade of approximately 80,000 tonnes a year, at around US$20 a kilogram, beche-de-mer is lucrative. The main markets are Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.
On Friday Papua New Guinea's National Fisheries Authority raided an industrial center in the capital Port Moresby and confiscated 2,970kg of illegally bought beche-de-mer.
Fisheries official Lamiller Pawut said Papua New Guinea has a ban on fishing and trading in beche-de-mer, but locals were being used to buy beche-de-mer and shark fins by some Asians.
Illegal beche-de-mer trading also hit the Galapagos Islands, made famous by Charles Darwin.
Ecuador's El Comercio newspaper reported a case of 500 beche-de-mer being confiscated at the airport on Isabela Island just as it was being loaded on an air force plane.
The Galapagos beche-de-mer fishery was closed in 1995 but illegal trading continues.
Beche-de-mer suffers the same unfortunate fate of some other odd creatures of the world: the Chinese happen to regard it as something of an aphrodisiac.
In Fiji beche-de-mer trading is legal and worth around US$14 million a year, but many divers get "the bends" and sometimes die because of the dangerous diving practices.
Tonga and the Cook Islands have laws against collecting the animals, but a previous Tongan minister of police, the late Noble Aka'uola, ordered prisoners to collect it. Where the proceeds went was a matter of conjecture.
Pacific Islanders, like many others, are deterred from eating it by its unpleasant appearance and habits.
When under threat beche-de-mer squirt out all their intestines -- for trivia fans this is known as "autoevisceration." They grow a new set but it's a bit like eating sausages -- best not to know how they are made.
The unendearing creature was, together with sandalwood, one of the attractions for European traders in the late 17th and 18th centuries as they pushed into the Pacific.
They knew there was a market for the "sea cucumbers" in China, but they did not know how to dry them, nor did the islanders.
The technology came in the form of "Manilamen," Filipinos who used a technique similar to that of drying tobacco.
Hundreds of people were used to gather beche-de-mer, and a lot of wood was used to fuel the fires that had to dry out the animals. The trade peaked between 1822 and 1850, creating socially and logistically complex relationships.
Beche-de-mer died out in the South Pacific because of excessive harvesting -- just as it has done in Asian waters.
As one recent scientific paper -- which was published by the South Pacific Community -- notes, "very little is known concerning recruitment, growth and mortality" of the animals. The paper adds that they appear "slow-growing and very vulnerable and therefore constitute `fragile stocks.'"
There exists something like 1,200 species of the sea cucumber. Commercially the main species is Holothuria nobilis or the black teatfish, extensively fished in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea.
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