PDF of pictures that shows good harvesting on a kelp farm.
Digital library
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Alaska’s burgeoning kelp farming industry has its success tied to two hatcheries and a law. Blue Evolution is working under a collaborative research and development agreement with NOAA to use the Kodiak Fisheries Research Center hatchery to grow the kelp seed that the company will supply to growers on partner farms.
“NOAA provides a space (no lease), and we capitalize the equipment,” says CEO Beau Perry. “And we work with them on various research threads.” Much of the east coast oyster industry technology was developed under this type of agreement with the NOAA facility in Connecticut in the early 1970s, Perry points out.
“Currently, there are many nascent aquaculture business across the country working with NOAA in this way,” he adds. The hatchery uses a recirculating system, and is able to utilize unused cold rooms at the facility, as opposed to water chillers. Perry estimates it has nearly 100 tanks, with capacity for several thousand spools and hundreds of thousands of feet of seeded string.
“We will certainly be pushing up against capacity as we are lowering the density of spools and tanks per cold room this season,” he explains. “But we can expand further using auxiliary space in the future.”
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Kelp farming, as well as the farming of various other seaweeds, is a significant and growing industry worldwide as seaweeds, especially kelp, are used for food, medicinal products, additives and bioremediation. Although the farming and use of seaweeds has a long history in many Asian and European countries, much of the rest of the world is only now recognizing the unique nutritional and health values of seaweeds. In addition to increased worldwide consumption, a recent development is the growing and harvesting of kelp for conversion to biofuels. A great deal of research is currently underway to evaluate the economics of these activities, project future demand for these algal products and to determine how best to meet increased global demand.
As the demand for kelp increases, however, relying solely on wild harvest may lead to severe declines of the natural populations such as happened in the fin fish and shellfish harvesting industries. Increased cultivation of kelp will be required to provide a consistent and traceable supply of biomass to industries that process the kelp for food or functional products. This increase in the number and size of farm sites may lead to more conflicts with fishermen, recreational boaters and waterfront land owners. These conflicts may be mitigated by an appreciation of the beneficial aspects that kelp and other seaweed aquaculture farms frequently provide such as habitat and water quality improvements.
The natural life cycle of kelp plants produces one harvestable sporophyte (adult) population per year. An advantage of farming kelp is the potential for growing more than one harvestable crop per year as well as providing the opportunity for selection of species that exhibit desired taste, vigor and resistance to biofouling.
What follows is this manual is an introduction to the processes, equipment and techniques for growing kelp from spores to harvest. Although there is significant farming of kelp worldwide, farming kelp in the Gulf of Maine has been very limited.
This manual describes the techniques developed and used successfully by Ocean Approved, LLC in conjunction with Dr. Charles Yarish and Dr. Jang Kim of the University of Connecticut to farm kelp in New England waters.
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In a first for Long Island Sound, 120 pounds of kelp farmed in waters near the Thimble Islands has made its way to the plates and soupbowls of New York City restaurants.
"We're the only one in the country selling a fresh kelp product," said Bren Smith, owner of the Thimble Island Oyster Co., which grew the long, wide kelp ribbons on a 20-acre plot where he also raises oysters, mussels and clams. "It has a short shelf life, but because I'm close to New York City, I can sell it directly there."
Margaret Van Patten, communications director of Connecticut Sea Grant, said the sale is significant because it marks the first time seaweed farmed in the Sound has been sold as a food product.
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In previous editions of this newsletter, we considered topics by category. Beer, for example, or meat, or milk, or coffee. This edition is different, because we’re talking about seaweed, specifically kelp, which is a bit magical, because it can reduce carbon emissions in multiple categories of the food system.
My kelp journey began in 2014 with a chance encounter in a hot tub on a roof in Monterey, where I enjoyed a cocktail with leading fish authority Paul Greenberg. The next morning, I joined Greenberg, who was researching rock fish, scuba diving in the amazing (and amazingly cold) kelp forest in Monterey Bay. I don’t remember much about the rock fish, but the kelp forrest was memorable; it felt like a canvas on which the otters, the fish and the divers were being painted.
My kelp journey continues seven years and 3,306 miles later. On Monday I arrived in Portland, Maine, which, like Asheville, is filled with microbreweries. It is a fun place with great seafood and salty characters. I was brought there by Casey Emmett, who came to my attention in the two-part series on seaweed in the How to Save a Planet podcast.
Casey and I boarded Stewart Hunt’s lobster boat and harvested about 6000 lbs of sugar kelp on a gorgeous cool sunny day. So much fun to get wet and dirty and help hard working people launch what will one day be a huge industry.
How can kelp help?
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In 2018, seaweed farmers working with Atlantic Sea Farms harvested 30,000 pounds of kelp and the fledgling seaweed aquaculture industry was largely viewed as a “side hustle” that allowed Maine lobstermen to generate additional income in the off-season.
“There was a market opportunity that intersected with an economic development opportunity to help diversify fisheries in the face of climate change,” explained Briana Warner, CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms. “Two of the biggest importers of seaweed are Costco and Trader Joe’s so it’s not like this is a niche segment [but] what hasn’t been done before is having a clean, fresh product grown here in the United States.”
Although global seaweed aquaculture production has increased from 10.5 million tons in 2000 to 32.3 million tons in 2018, according to the latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, almost 90 percent of those farms are located in Asia. Atlantic Sea Farms, which bills itself as the first commercially viable seaweed farm in the United States, is working to change that.
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To probe the effect of kelp waste extracts (KWE) combined with acetate on biochemical composition of Chlorella sorokiniana, the cultures were performed under independent/combined treatment of KWE and acetate. The results showed that high cell density and biomass were obtained by KWE combined with acetate treatments, whose biomass productivity increased by 79.69-102.57% and 20.04-35.32% compared with 3.0gL-1 acetate and KWE treatments respectively. The maximal neutral lipid per cell and lipid productivity were gained in KWE combined with 3.0gL-1 acetate treatment, which increased by 16.32% and 129.03% compared with 3.0gL-1 acetate, and 253.35% and 70.74% compared with KWE treatment. Meanwhile, C18:3n3 and C18:2n6c contents were reduced to 4.90% and 11.88%, whereas C16:0 and C18:1n9c were improved to 28.71% and 37.76%. Hence, supplementing appropriate acetate in KWE cultures is supposed to be a great potential method for large-scale cultivation of C. sorokiniana to generate biofuel.
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The cold-water sugar kelp, Saccharina latissima has a circumboreal distribution and in the Northwest Atlantic is at its southern distributional limits in Long Island Sound. An understanding of genetic diversity of natural kelp populations is critical for making recommendations for breeding and cultivation efforts of the growing seaweed aquaculture sector in the US. An important component of the ARPA-E’s MARINER project is selectively breeding Saccharina spp. in order to improve overall productivity for biofuels, feeds and food. Historical records indicate the presence of regional kelp ecotypes based on physiological tolerance, specifically temperature. We made collections of 15 wild Saccharina spp. populations via SCUBA along the New England coast. Microscopic gametophytes were isolated and the parental populations were used to make over 500 hybrid crosses that were planted at several farm locations over several years. We then used genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data to explore the genetic structure of the kelp throughout this region. An assessment of the sequence diversity revealed distinct genetic variation between the Gulf of Maine and Southern New England (FST > 0.25), confirming that Cape Cod acts as a barrier to S. latissima gene flow. Furthermore, based on the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA), we found the largest variance (58%) within sites. We also observed admixture among three ancestral populations and isolation by distance. Future steps for this project include skim sequencing the haploid microscopic gametophytes to identify trait heritability, phenotypic diversity observed for both morphological traits and tissue composition, and genomic selection. Furthermore, in the future, we plan to place our sequence data into a larger context to include samples from sites in the east Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
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The flow of non-living carbon (detritus) is considered an important process because it connects ecosystems and fuels benthic communities. In Norwegian kelp forests, 90% of the kelp production is exported to adjacent ecosystems where it can play a significant role in shaping benthic communities. We quantified the major structural and functional traits of an Arctic deep-sea ecosystem associated with kelp exports and assessed the ecological role of kelp export into the deep-sea system. We first developed a food-web model using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) approach to represent the state of the deep (450 m) ecosystem of the Malangen fjord (Northern Norway) in 2017. Subsequently, we used the temporal dynamic model Ecosim to explore the structure and functioning traits of a theoretical deep-sea ecosystem projecting a decrease of kelp detritus biomass reaching the deep-sea ecosystem. Overall, our findings reveal that kelp detritus from shallow coastal areas has a small but noticeable role structuring the deep-sea ecosystem of Malangen. The temporal simulations show important differences depending on the application of mediating effects, which allow considering the detritus as a mediating group in prey-predator interaction, in addition to its direct role in trophic relationships. When mediating effects are applied, biomass increases for benthopelagic shrimps and suprabenthos groups and decreases for rays and skates, velvet belly, rabbitfish and other commercial demersal fishes under the low kelp detritus scenarios. Biomass-based and trophic-based indicators reveal a noticeable impact on the deep-sea ecosystem structure due to depletion of kelp detritus. To further assess future changes of the Arctic deep-sea ecosystems, dependencies with adjacent ecosystems, such as kelp detritus production, should be included.
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Long-distance dispersal is one of the main drivers structuring the distribution of marine biodiversity. This study reports the first occurrence of Macrocystis pyrifera and Durvillaea antarctica rafts on the southwestern warm temperate coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Our results indicate that an extreme meteo-oceanographic event, characterized by a northward, displacement of cold sub-Antarctic oceanic waters driven by an extratropical cyclone, could account for these unusual occurrences. A niche model based on known current distribution and maximum entropy principle (MAXENT), revealed the availability of suitable habitats at lower latitudes, outside their actual distribution edges. The distributional boundaries, mainly driven by temperature and irradiance, suggest the existence of environmental suitability in warm temperate areas, as well as in the Northern Hemisphere off Atlantic and Asian coasts. These theoretical edges and respective environmental drivers agree with the physiological affinities of both species, supporting the hypothesis that these variables act as limiting factors for their occurrences in tropical or warmer areas. Emerging regions can function as refuges and stepping-stones, providing substrate with adequate habitat conditions for recruitment of propagules, allowing eventual colonization. Long dispersal events reinforce the need for an extensive discussion on selective management of natural dispersion, biological invasions, refuge mapping and conservation initiatives in a transnational perspective.
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Marine Agronomy Group, CAFNRM, UH-Hilo
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