October 20, 2014 — Local fishermen this year have had a tough time with a species of red seaweed, an algae, that looks like matted hair. The algae began to bloom and spread in May.
Nets would get fouled – often beyond recognition – and the fishermen would spend hours cleaning them, only to have their nets get “weeded up” on the very next tide. And to add insult to injury, when the weed was thickest, covering acres of the seabed, the nets would often be empty of fish.
“Sure, every spring and summer we see our share of seaweed,” said Narragansett’s Galilee village fisherman Aaron Gewirtz, owner and operator of the gillnetter Nancy Beth. “We’re used to that. But this season, we all knew something very different was going on.”
The culprit, according to Carol Thornber, University of Rhode Island associate professor of biological sciences and a leading expert on seaweeds and coastal ecology, was Heterosiphonia japonica.