Saving Seafood

MAINE: In the land of lobster, seaweed is finding its niche

December 7, 2021 — The annual Maine harvest of seaweed pales in comparison to lobster landings in pounds and value. Yet increasingly, lobstermen have joined other entrepreneurs in growing, harvesting and marketing Maine seaweed. Seen as another means of diversifying the state’s commercial fishing industry, it is turning into a multimillion-dollar industry and keeping in-shore fishermen busy during lobster’s off season. 

Rockweed, common along the Maine coast, accounts for about 95 percent of commercially harvested seaweed. It’s used for packing lobsters, as fertilizer and a nutritional additive for pet and livestock feed, and to extract alginate, used to thicken foods, cosmetics and even paint. 

But a smaller but growing market is for kelp, sugar kelp, dulse and Alaria, edible sea vegetables grown and harvested for nutritional and flavor supplements in a variety of foods. 

“People are recognizing its health benefits, its environmental benefits, and it tastes great,” Island Institute’s Sam Belknap said. The institute recently supported new aquaculturists, including seaweed growers, in a program for fishermen.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

 

Maine seaweed harvest set record in 2018, but court rulings cloud future

January 17, 2020 — Seaweed, or sea vegetables, have been on a growth trajectory for the past 10 years. What started as a small industry has blossomed into a sustainable economic engine for coastal communities from New York to Maine, who have faced slowdowns in other once-dominant fisheries.

“Five percent of Maine’s aquaculture lease and limited-purpose aquaculture LPA holders (47 individuals) also hold a commercial lobster fishing license. Out of those 47, 12 of them farm kelp. Out of 60 total kelp farmers in Maine, that’s 20 percent,” says Afton Hupper of the Maine Aquaculture Association. “Lobstermen are already equipped with much of the gear required to start a kelp farm,” adds Hupper. “It is a good way to diversify and supplement their income.”

In Maine, harvest of all seaweed species peaked in 2018, with 22 million pounds, according to Maine Department of Marine Resources data. But a recent Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling has meant changes to the rockweed industry. Until this year, wild rockweed (Ascophyllum nodosum) — with landings consistently making up more than 95 percent of all landings statewide — was harvested along coastlines. Last year, it was valued under $1 million at the docks.

But now, permission from landowners is required to harvest, since the court determined rockweed in the intertidal zone to be the landowner’s private property. Maine landowners now have a say in how rockweed is harvested, as well as the opportunity to benefit from the industry.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

MAINE: Midcoast businesses say court ruling on seaweed harvest could be devastating

May 10, 2019 — Two Waldoboro businesses are grappling with a March court ruling that could restrict seaweed harvesting throughout the state.

Both North American Kelp, at 41 Cross St., and Ocean Organics Corp., at 141 One Pie Road, have based their business models on sustainable rockweed harvesting, parlaying the natural resource to create jobs and grow their companies.

On March 28, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled that rockweed along the seashore isn’t public property in a 22-page opinion upholding a 2017 ruling by the Washington County Superior Court.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

After Growing Like A Weed For Years, Maine’s Seaweed Industry Faces New Restrictions

May 6, 2019 — Maine’s seaweed business has grown like a weed in recent years, with proponents touting it as both a “superfood” and an economic generator for the rural state — but the industry is now facing sticky new restrictions.

Maine has a long tradition of seaweed harvesting, in which the algae is gathered for a wide variety of commercial uses, including some popular food products. Now, a recent court ruling could dramatically change the nature of the business in Maine, which has seen the harvest of the gooey stuff grow by leaps and bounds in the last decade, industry members said.

The state’s highest court ruled last month that permission from coastal landowners is needed for harvesting rockweed, a type of seaweed that’s critical to the industry. The Maine Seaweed Council, an industry advocacy group, has called the ruling “a disappointing setback” that will force harvesters to adjust.

The court’s decision could mandate the implementation of rules that are difficult to enforce, said George Seaver, a vice president of Waldoboro firm Ocean Organics, who has been involved in processing rockweed for 40 years. Rockweed is harvested from tidal mudflats where property boundaries can be ill-defined, he said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WBUR

Maine: How Seaweed Connects Us All

May 31, 2018 — Among Rachel Carson’s many literary virtues is this: she was a keen observer of seaweed. In The Edge of the Sea, Carson’s 1955 ode to America’s eastern seaboard, she extolled the “smooth and satiny” tendrils of horsetail kelp, the “fleshy, amber-colored tubers” of sea potato, the “paper-thin layers” of dulse. Scraps of Porphyra, she wrote, resembled “little pieces of brown transparent plastic cut out of someone’s raincoat.”

No intertidal dweller captured Carson’s imagination like Ascophyllum nodosum, a rubbery, olive-colored, ubiquitous macroalgae known widely on the Atlantic coast as rockweed. The biologist was most enchanted by rockweed’s double life—how its identity changed with the tides. When the ocean withdrew from the Maine beach, she noted, the seaweed lay limp; when the tide returned, the submerged plants stood erect, “rising and swaying with a life borrowed from the sea.” The diversity of these undersea jungles, whose canopies sometimes stretch taller than two meters, enthralled Carson. “Small fishes swim, passing between the weeds as birds fly through a forest, sea snails creep along the fronds, and crabs climb from branch to branch,” she wrote.

We are accustomed to thinking of seaweed as a stage, the undulant backdrop against which play the dramas of more charismatic fish and shellfish. Today, however, rockweed stars as lead actor in one of Maine’s strangest resource conflicts. Although seaweed harvesting is hardly a new industry—New England’s farmers have nourished their fields with “sea manure” for centuries—rockweed has lately become a valuable commercial product, an ingredient in everything from fertilizers to pet foods to nutritional supplements. In 2017, Maine’s rockweeders gathered nearly nine million kilograms and raked in over $600,000, roughly four times the haul in 2001.

Inevitably, not everyone is thrilled about the boom. As rockweed’s profile has grown, the controversy over its management has escalated, ascending through Maine’s legal system all the way to the chambers of the state’s supreme court. This seaweed struggle, and the fate of A. nodosum itself, hinges on a single question, patently absurd yet bizarrely complex: is rockweed, in defiance of logic and biology, really a fish?

Read the full story at the Smithsonian Magazine

 

No one knows who ‘owns’ rockweed in Maine

March 10, 2017 — For 15 years, shore-front property owners, rockweed cutters and Maine Department of Marine Resources regulators have attempted to balance the competing interests that have tended to define the state’s rockweed industry.

Maine case law has produced mixed opinions on the question of who actually owns the olive-brown algae that is used in fertilizer and in some consumable products.

But a Washington County Superior Court case could help settle what’s become a contentious rockweed debate.

At high tide, rockweed floats on the water’s surface along the Maine coast, its rubbery, olive-brown plant strands buoyed by a series of air bladders. At low tide, it drapes shore-front rocks to provide protective habitat for crabs and other creatures. It was a source of fertilizer for English colonists who spelled out access rights in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Colonial Ordinance of 1641-1647. Since then, though, who owns Maine’s rockweed – or Ascophyllum nodosum, as it is known in scientific circles – remains an unanswered question for property owners, conservationists and harvesters.

Gordon Smith is a Portland attorney who represents several Washington County landowners upset that their shore-front properties have become targets for rockweed harvesters. They’ve made Acadian Seaplants Ltd. the focus of a lawsuit filed in Superior Court. The Nova Scotian biotech company is the largest independent manufacturer of marine plant products of its type in the world. Smith says that based on his reading of case law, it is clear to him that landowners control access in the inter-tidal zone of their property – a point he repeatedly made during arguments in court last week.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News