PWAC Victoria: Tom Koppel, Writing Sample

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Forests of the Sea

by Tom Koppel ©

Exotic delicacy, fuel source, possible cancer cure--kelp is not just for sea urchins anymore. Published in Canadian Geographic, Mar./Apr. 1997.

Seen from below, a bed of kelp is a living, ever-moving phantasmagoria of filtered light and muted colour. Vertical stem-like stipes rise from the sea bottom. Streaming off them with the current, luxuriant blades of olive-green foliage a metre or two long wave gently as the sinuous ocean swell rolls through. Schools of tiny fish flash silver and blue as they dart in and out, seeking food, shelter or a place to spawn. Larger rock fish, their colours blending with the kelp as camouflage, hover nearby. A closer look would reveal kelp crabs, small snails, and tiny fixed animals, bryozoa, which form blotchy white colonies on the blades and provide sustenance to animals higher on the food chain. With its dense greenery and tightly woven web of life, a kelp bed is truly a forest of the sea.

Charles Darwin, the great naturalist, noted this similarity in 1834. Visiting the tip of South America, he was astonished at the extent of the local kelp beds and described them as "great aquatic forests." Studying the diversity of life they harboured, he found shrimp-like crustaceans, bivalve molluscs, cuttlefish, starfish and a host of other animals, all of them dependent on kelp. He wrote that if a terrestrial forest were destroyed, "I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would have from the destruction of the kelp."

Just as science and society have increasingly recognized the importance and value of forests, so it is with kelp. Coastal peoples have utilized kelp for millennia for food, fertilizer and chemicals such as iodine and caustic soda. Recent years, however, have seen a renewed interest in kelp in Canada and other countries with large seaweed stocks. As a food, kelp blades are being eaten in a variety of recipes; kelp coated with herring eggs has become a high-priced export delicacy that contributes significantly to the native economy on the British Columbia coast. In medicine, kelp is valued as a natural vitamin and mineral supplement and shows great promise for fighting cancer. It is being tried as a feed in aquaculture. It can even be used to produce fuel. Kelp is an abundant renewable resource on all Canadian coasts. In fact, some B.C. kelp beds are now renewing themselves after more than a century of decline caused by the annihilation of the sea otter.

It is an exciting time to be working with this amazing and prolific cold water seaweed, says Louis Druehl, Canada's leading expert on kelp. A professor of marine botany at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University, Druehl has spent over 30 years studying the many kelps of the world. (All are classified as brown algae; other seaweeds include green algae such as sea lettuce and red algae such as nori, which is familiar to sushi lovers.) Druehl is based in Bamfield, a remote seaside village on Vancouver Island's west coast, where he is also associate director of the university-run Bamfield Marine Station. In the late 1970s, he started the first kelp farm outside of Asia. With his wife, Rae Hopkins, he also runs Canadian Kelp Resources Ltd., which markets dried kelp as a "sea vegetable" and roasted kelp flakes as a low-sodium seasoning, mainly to health food stores in Vancouver.

On a typical harvest day, Druehl and Hopkins cruise the coastline of scenic, island-studded Barkley Sound in their little outboard whaler, Kelp Express. The tide is out. Along the shore a black bear mucks around in the intertidal seaweed looking for crabs. A mink scurries among the boulders. Bald eagles perch in trees. And everywhere, the rocky evergreen strand is fringed by dark, scraggly lines of kelp floating just offshore.

Druehl takes the boat into a watery maze of jagged rocks that are covered in a patchwork of mussels, starfish and shallow-water kelps, such as the broad-bladed winged kelp. Reaching out to a wet, cliff-like rock face lapped by waves, Hopkins cuts off some narrow blades of a kelp she calls kombu after a similar type savoured by the Japanese. Some kelps live fourteen years or longer, so Hopkins carefully harvests only the blades, and the plant produces new ones in two or three months. Kelp are such phenomenal growers, says Druehl, that taking some eight tonnes (wet weight) of wild kelp a year, "we're not even scratching the surface. We usually can't go back and tell where we've been." Unlike logging, where the tree is removed, "every plant keeps on growing. It's like cutting grass."

Bull kelp, a deep-water floating type that is by far the most common in B.C., grows so fast that, starting from its anchor-like holdfast on the rocky bottom, it reaches the surface from 20 or 30 metres depth in three to four months. Its thin stipe is buoyed on the surface by an air bladder the size and shape of a light bulb. Bull kelp usually lives only one year, breaking loose in the storms of winter and ending up on beaches in long mats, where it provides a home for sand fleas.

"We have over 20 species of kelp right here in B.C.," says Druehl, "the greatest diversity in the world." By comparison, some six species grow on Hudson Bay and a similar number on Canada's Atlantic coast. All kelps begin life as microscopic spores drifting by the zillions throughout the water column. These divide into filament-like males and females, which produce eggs and sperm. Then, fertilization creates a new generation of tiny kelp plants that attach themselves on the bottom. In Barkley Sound, and much of B.C.'s outer coast, growing conditions are ideal. The clean cold water, circulating with strong currents and wave action from the open Pacific, contains ample phosphates and nitrates, so kelp thrives.

But kelp ecosystems are complex and subject to disruption. Thick intermittent barriers of deep-water kelp hundreds of kilometres long used to run parallel to the shore along much of B.C.'s most exposed central coast and western Vancouver Island. Even when the wind raised a vicious sea, Indian canoes could often navigate safely in the narrow lane of sheltered water between the kelp and the shore. As Darwin wrote, "the beds of this seaweed, even when of not great breadth, make excellent natural floating breakwaters. It is quite curious to see, in an exposed harbour, how soon waves from the open sea, as they travel through the straggling stems, sink in height and pass into smooth water."

The fur trade, however, indirectly destroyed much of this kelp because of a symbiosis between kelp and sea otters. Kelp is a favourite food for spiny sea urchins, which in turn are preyed upon by otters. After Captain James Cook visited Vancouver Island in 1778, the shiny black sea otter pelts his men obtained commanded fabulous prices in China, so the hapless marine mammal was rapidly trapped and hunted to extinction on the B.C. coast. Without these predators to keep them in check, the urchin populations exploded, creating underwater wastelands called urchin barrens and destroying much of the barrier kelp.

Today, this kelp is renewing itself. In the early 1970s, the Canadian government transplanted a few dozen sea otters from Alaska to isolated Checleset Bay on northwestern Vancouver Island. There they thrived and now number around 1,500. They are extending their range southward and have also established a separate population of some 200 on B.C.'s central coast. The shoreline has changed dramatically. Marine biologist Anne Stewart, a former student of Louis Druehl's who has dived in this area, says "where the otters have been eating urchins, there are magnificent kelp forests. And the diversity of life and just the lushness of the whole scene is incredible." Another of Druehl's students experimented by fencing off an urchin barren and removing the prickly critters. In one year thick kelp had colonized the area. As the sea otters spread, now protected by law, the kelp breakwaters should return to their former glory.

Living near these natural marine gardens, west coast Indians have traditionally depended on kelp. Natives used to stretch and twist the stipes of bull kelp into strong fishing lines. The hollow bulbs and thicker ends of the stipes were dried and used as "bottles" for eulachon oil, a prized condiment. These could be coiled into boxes, hung for storage or traded to interior Indians.

Kelp beds provide ideal surfaces for herring to deposit their eggs when they spawn, and kelp blades coated with a thick frosting of spawn have always been a popular dish among west coast natives. In the Haida village of Skidegate after a heavy 1975 herring run, writes Hilary Stewart in her book, Indian Fishing, "long lengths of seaweed, creamy amber with spawn, hung from nearly every porch and sun deck; racks and clotheslines in gardens and carports were festooned with it." The owner of a local hardware store "said he hadn't a clothespin left in the place."

More recently, this venerable harvest has evolved into an extremely lucrative commercial fishery. The Japanese love to eat raw kelp coated with herring eggs in their sushi bars. In 1979 the Canadian government began issuing spawn-on-kelp (also called roe-on-kelp) licences. Because of the native tradition, and to boost the coastal native economies, most of the fishery was allocated to native Indians. Today, they hold 30 of the 39 licences in what has grown to be a $22.2 million harvest, almost entirely for export to Japan. To enhance production, crews fill floating net enclosures ("ponds") with dangling blades of giant kelp, a deep-water type that grows up to 100 metres long with foliage all along the stipe. A seine boat catches a netful of egg-laden herring and puts them into the pond to spawn. The herring are later released to live and spawn again the following year.

An entirely new idea for using kelp in Canada is as a fuel. Almost any plant matter can be partially digested by bacteria--in the absence of oxygen from the air--to produce clean-burning methane, or biogas. So when Ian Copland looks out over the thick kelp beds of Hudson Bay, in the Arctic, he sees a potential source of renewable energy.

Copland and his wife Elizabeth run Kivalliq Land and Sea Resources Ltd., a budding family company in the isolated Inuit community of Whale Cove. They saw a TV program featuring Louis Druehl and kelp, and realized that harvesting and selling Hudson Bay kelp might provide income and employment for the job-hungry population of 300. With territorial and federal government funding, Druehl and his company were brought in to survey the local kelp and advise on processing and marketing it as deep-fried chips, chemical extracts for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, even as a kind of tea.

There was one big problem. Energy costs for drying the kelp in Whale Cove, where fuel is brought in by ship during the ice-free season, would be as much as ten times as high as in southern Canada. Druehl, however, had done research on growing kelp for biogas in California in the early 1980s, when galloping oil prices led the U.S. government and gas companies to study alternative energy sources. Oil prices soon fell, and the project was shelved. But biogas from kelp has been generated on a modest scale on the island of Sein, off Britanny, France, where energy costs are high. And for Whale Cove the idea seemed to make sense.

Druehl chemically analyzed the most abundant Hudson Bay kelps and calculated that every tonne of wet kelp could produce 20 to 40 cubic metres of methane, with an energy equivalent of up to 272 kilowatt hours of electricity. Organic human waste and garbage--both difficult to get rid of in the Arctic--could be digested with the kelp and the protein-rich residue sold as fertilizer to pay part of the costs. A survey found 8,000 to 24,000 tonnes of wild growing kelp in the Whale Cove area, and large rafts of loose, drifting kelp, hundreds of tonnes of it, especially after storms, when it is also a navigational hazard. "It's no problem going out there, scooping it up and bringing it ashore," says Ian Copland, or collecting it off beaches with a loader and dump truck, chopping it and feeding it into the digestor.

A practical digestor might be a huge, well-insulated bag, anchored by cables in a wind-sheltered ravine, with wet, burbling kelp in the bottom and biogas collecting above. A portion of the kelp could be replaced each day, and the gas used directly or compressed for storage. The Coplands have applied for funds for a pilot project to prove that methane can be produced efficiently under Arctic conditions.

Some of the most exciting new uses for kelp are in nutrition and medicine. Kelp tablets are a natural dietary supplement providing a broad range of vitamins and minerals. Kelp flakes can be used as a low-sodium salt substitute to fight hypertension. More dramatic, however, is the recent discovery by French and Japanese scientists that fucans and alginates, compounds found in kelp, are very potent anti-tumour agents in cancer therapy. And an extract from one common kelp suppresses the genetic mutations that can initiate cancerous tumours. "Because the brown seaweeds evolved separately from green plants, there is a diversity of compounds in kelp and other brown algae that is not found in any other organisms," says Louis Druehl. Many are likely to have medical applications. So, like tropical rain forests, kelp beds may prove to be invaluable sources of natural pharmaceuticals.

Another new use for kelp in B.C. is as a feed in the growing aquaculture industry. One native band is experimenting with fattening up captive sea urchins for market. Others are feeding kelp to abalone, a scarce sea snail in high demand for Asian restaurants. Some 650,000 tonnes of wild kelp grows along the B.C. coast. Current government rules would allow about 100,000 tonnes to be harvested each year under strict guidelines. In 1996, though, only 450 tonnes were licensed for harvest, so the potential for expansion is enormous.

Although wild kelp stocks are huge, cultivating kelp, a common practice in Japan and China, also has its attractions. Back out on Barkley Sound, Louis Druehl and Rae Hopkins cruise around to their kelp farm, which produces around seven tonnes of wet kelp a year. On the surface, it is an unobtrusive half-hectare of sheltered bay marked only by bobbing black and yellow floats. But two metres below the water, rising and falling with the tide, is a solidly anchored grid of ropes they have seeded with baby kelp, which Druehl raises in a cool, eerily lit laboratory chamber at the Marine Station. Hopkins rigs a grapple and winch over the gunwale and pulls up a long, crinkly mass of yellowish sugar kelp.

One advantage of kelp farming is that sugar kelp, for example, is so rare it would not be practical to harvest in the wild. Farmed kelp, grown well above the sea floor, is also free of silt and protected from urchins. Moreover, harvesting wild stocks on wave-beaten shorelines is labour-intensive and can be dangerous.

Whether farmed or harvested wild, the kelp is taken back to the company workshop. It is trimmed and picked over for cleanliness, in some cases cured in the sun, and hung on racks in a heated drying shed. Overnight the limp, rubbery blades turn brittle, as they lose the 90% of their weight that is water. Then Hopkins or an employee clips, weighs and packs the kelp for shipment.

Hopkins, a professional cook and booster of kelp as a healthy sea vegetable, has been experimenting with new ways to serve kelp. Winged kelp, for example, can be soaked in water to soften it and used as a substitute for cabbage in cabbage rolls. Giant kelp can be used instead of nori for wrapping rice when making sushi. "The Japanese pay big yen for this product," she says. With her shipments of dried kelp and roasted kelp flakes, she sends retail stores menu cards suggesting recipes.

On the deck of their home, overlooking a sheltered inlet, Hopkins and Druehl tuck into lunch, starting with crispy little squares of giant kelp deep fried in oil like potato chips. This is followed by a chicken soup enhanced with shredded kelp greens. The various kelps differ slightly in flavour, though all have the salt and iodine tang of the sea. And all are a bit chewier than the more delicate red seaweeds. It is definitely an acquired taste. But propelled by a curiosity about exotic foods and an interest in low-fat, lean cuisine, Canadians appear to be catching on.

If kelp does become a major food item in this country, it is one that likely will never be in short supply. Just outside the inlet, stretching in both directions along the shores of Barkley Sound as far as the eye can see, the great forests of kelp rise and fall with the tide.

Tom Koppel
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Last updated: April 22, 2002 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/koppel05.html