Seaweed from Alaska’s beaches makes really great plant fertilizer. And more people on the Kenai Peninsula are catching on, as harvesting the marine plant becomes more popular.

Now, researchers are putting seaweed under the microscope to make sure that harvest isn’t causing harm to the populations that rely on it to survive. Sabine Poux reports for KBBI.

From above, the seaweed on the beaches of Homer and Anchor Point doesn’t look like much.

But under the microscope, there are entire worlds in every sample. That’s what University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Brian Ulaski found when he analyzed the seaweed that had washed up on Homer beaches — also called “wrack.” His team found thousands of organisms in samples they collected two years ago.

“The next time you’re walking the beach, if you look a little bit closer at that wrack line you might be surprised at how much life you find in there.”

Ulaski’s study comes on the heels of an uptick in interest in wrack, from commercial and subsistence harvesters.

One farmer in Anchor Point, Al Poindexter of Anchor Point Greenhouse, has been using seaweed for decades to make a potting soil called Fishy Peat. In the last couple years, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has started issuing permits for the harvest — about three per year. The season for harvesting is open September through April .

Research Biologist Ted Otis says Alaskans are catching on to the seaweed hype.

“A lot of local folks collect wrack off the beach for their gardens. We were just trying to get ahead of it a little bit and learn a little bit about that resource.”

And he says some Alaskans are looking into turning seaweed into biofuel — which would ramp up the commercial harvest.

Area Management Biologist Glenn Hollowell says in the last eight or nine years, the Department of Fish and Game started taking a harder look at seaweed.

“We realized that kelp on beaches wasn’t like going out and picking up driftwood or rocks. This stuff may have value.”

To learn more about that seaweed, Fish and Game got in touch with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

And that’s where Ulaski, a postdoctoral fellow at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, comes in.

To gather samples, he used clam guns to punch holes into the wrack line and the sediment below, at about a dozen sites near Homer, from Anchor Point to Bishop’s Beach on one side of the bay, and then between Seldovia and Grewingk River on the other.

“So when we looked at those samples in the lab and under the scope, there were a lot of critters.”

Over more than six months of sampling, they found over 47,000 different invertebrates in the wrack,  like coastal centipedes and pseudoscorpions.

“You don’t really see much activity in the wrack unless you’re looking at it very closely. … So it was kind of a pleasant surprise the amount of organisms we found in those samples.”

Brenda Konar is a professor with the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at UAF. She says the study is a good benchmark for what organisms are found in the wrack.

“So if there’s any question or concerns about certain types of organisms or certain species, we kind of can go to this list and say, ‘Well, we know these things exist there.’”

Konar says that information is important for other species that feed on wrack in those areas, like birds.

“And that’s one of the concerns, is that if too much of it is harvested, then all of these organisms that these birds rely on aren’t going to be around, cause their habitat isn’t there.” … And especially important during times when there’s a big bird flyover — especially in the Homer area. There’s a lot of birds that come through there.”

Ulaski says future research, he’d want to look into the impacts of wrack on shorebird abundance.

And Konar says harvesters should think about the tiny but abundant ecosystems they’re harvesting when they hit the beaches on the southern peninsula.

“Sort of similar when you go to the forest and harvest your mushrooms. Those are little ecosystems, and it’s kind of just cool to think about what all is happening there.”

Hollowell, with Fish and Game, says already, the research is already informing the work he does at the management level. He says a presentation Ulaski gave to the Board of Fish in 2019 helped direct policy on commercial and personal use seaweed harvest.

View Original Story by Sabinne Poux, for KBBI