ANOTHER LIFE:IT IS ONE OF the richer threads to the weave of life on earth that the seaweeds on the rocky shores below me, and those in, say, Maine, across the Atlantic, where Rachel Carson used to go rock-pooling, are much the same species, growing in the same sequence of zones, from the topmost boulders right down to the waves and far out into the kelp forest offshore.
They have their separate niches, their different ways of dealing, at low tide, with exposure to sun and drying winds, their own forms of coping, frond by frond, with the surges of the sea. Their ecological regime, with local variations in species, goes right around the temperate shores of the world. Ireland has more than 500 seaweeds, and almost three-quarters of them are growing, in remarkable density and diversity, in the fretted granite coast of south Connemara.
It took the European discovery of Japanese cuisine to make the link between the wad of sun-dried dillisk chewed by a Connacht fisherman and the wrap of nori around the rice in sushi restaurants. Both are forms of Palmaria palmata, the seaweed waving its red fingers from Thallabawn to Tokyo.
Carrageen and sloke are two more familiar names from Ireland’s edible chew, once sold at Irish fairs. Sloke is Porphyra, pickable in tide pools, and Europe’s version of a favourite nori seaweed wrapping that is extensively farmed in Asia. As the Marine Institute has reminded us this month, it fetches up to €162 per 100g of packaged toasted sheets.
Porphyra is difficult and expensive to cultivate, needing a lengthy nursing from spores to grown plants, with crucial and tricky modulations of temperature and light. In a pioneering trial a native Irish species is being brought to the hatchery stage at Portaferry Marine Laboratory, in Co Down, with the hope of ultimate farming in Strangford Lough.
Irish Palmaria is much nearer a commercial future, after years of work at the Martin Ryan Institute's research station at Carna, in Connemara. More than a kilometre of seeded string is ready for threading into nets hung like curtains in the sea – an innovation in the seaweed's cultivation. And down in Roaringwater Bay, in west Cork, longlines waving fronds of kelp are nearing a first harvest – this of Laminaria digitata, a plant with increasingly wide uses in foods and pharmaceuticals.
All this has been funded under the umbrella of the Marine Institute’s Sea Change strategy, with its ambitious programme of research into seaweed use, from bulk harvesting for industrial alginates to farming of plants with high value for food, bodycare products and “parapharmaceuticals”.
That makes it all the more startling to learn that one of Ireland’s – indeed, the world’s – most important resources for the study of seaweeds, Prof Mike Guiry’s AlgaeBase, has been left high and dry for funding. As head of NUI Galway’s botany department, and director of the Martin Ryan Institute, the university’s centre of marine research, the Youghal-born scientist has been a leading figure in phycology – the study of algae – and a pioneering enthusiast for developing its uses.
AlgaeBase, his creation, is an online encyclopedia, mainly of ocean algae, but also those of freshwater and land. It currently spans more than 125,000 names of species and their forms, 44,000-odd bibliographic references, almost 10,000 images and 162,500 records and maps of where the algae grow around the world. It offers downloadable PDF files of science literature unobtainable outside of the big libraries.
“A fantastic tool for phycologists around the world . . . dynamic, ever changing, always being added to and enriched.” That was the judgment of the Phycological Society of America when, in Michigan last month, it presented Mike Guiry with its annual Award of Excellence.
AlgaeBase is not exclusively for scientists. Tap in “Palmaria palmata” at algaebase.org and, along with the science, you get an entertaining run-down of its history in Ireland. (For his more colourful, personal website full of popular knowledge of seaweed, go to seaweed.ie/guiry).
Until his recent retirement from NUI Galway, AlgaeBase was funded by the Higher Education Authority programme for university research, but retrenchments and cutbacks within NUIG have left him to carry on voluntarily, helped by his wife, Wendy.
He is also embarking on a new research project, in collaboration with a Canadian marine biologist, Gary Saunders, to “bar-code” the genetic identity of every Irish seaweed. This will be funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian government. But while Guiry addresses this week’s big conference at the National Biodiversity Data Centre, in Waterford – its theme is the “biodiversity knowledge quest” – a new panel shines out in the AlgaeBase website, soliciting donations, through Paypal, to carry it on.
Eye on nature
In a wheat field bordered by willowherb I came across a dark greenish-brown caterpillar with what looked like a large eye on its end. I checked and it looked like a willowherb hawkmoth caterpillar, not found in these islands.
Noel Brady, Dublin 9
It was the caterpillar of the elephant hawkmoth, which feeds on willowherb.
Last week at Carrowniskey strand, in Co Mayo, a couple of dolphins came in close to the shore; the following day a bigger group was playing together. A girl I spoke with had been swimming close to them, and two came very gently to her and circled her while she was swimming – she was blown away by the experience.
Louise Killeen,
Castlebar, Co Mayo
I spotted two silver-washed fritillary, one of which alighted and fed on a thistle flower. I have never seen it in this area.
George Langrish, Co Leitrim
They are quite common in your neighbouring county of Fermanagh.
A Scottish angler caught a specimen ling in the sheltered ground east of Inishbofin from our Bluewater charter boat, in wind force 6 to 7. It weighed 12.1kg, or 26.6lb.
John Brittain, Clifden, Co Galway
- Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address
