Researchers Utilize Century-Old Seaweed to Solve a Marine Mystery | Innovation|Smithsonian Publication

There are few things I enjoy more than turning a slimy piece of seaweed into a work of art. From scouring the tide pools for the ideal blades, to artfully arranging them on a paper in my herbarium press, every step of the procedure is immensely pleasing.

Using the same strategy that individuals use to press flowers, I can turn nearly any algae into a natural artwork that can last for centuries. I press algae for artistic purposes, algae pressing has long been a clinical pursuit.

The practice emerged in 19th-century England as a method for scientists and natural history buffs to maintain and catalog the varied range of seaweeds discovered along the country’s coasts.

Ladies were amongst the most devoted algae pressers. Artfully preserving seaweeds was one of the couple of methods women might add to science in the 19th century. At the time, ladies were excluded from a lot of clinical fields, with the exception of botany, which was considered an ideal hobby for them.

Thanks to the efforts of early algae pressers, numerous natural history museums consist of vast collections of algal pressings that date back centuries. Researchers have actually long counted on these repositories to offer a peek of what algal types were present in the past.

Over the last few years, nevertheless, scientists have actually discovered numerous brand-new methods of drawing out data from century-old pushed algae– and they’re being utilized to fix a suite of marine mysteries, including the cause of Monterey Bay’s terrible sardine fishery crash.

In a new released this past June, researchers from the Monterey Bay Fish tank examined a collection of dried, pushed seaweeds– dating back over 140 years– to learn what ocean conditions in the bay resembled in the early 19th century.

Working with colleagues from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in California, and the University of Hawai’i, fish tank researchers gathered pressings of seaweeds collected from Monterey Bay in between 1878 and 2018 and carried out a range of chemical analyses on their tissues.

“We were working with old and stunning specimens, so we tried to take the smallest samples possible,” says Emily Miller, the lead author of the research study, who now works as a research service technician at the Monterey Bay Fish Tank Research Institute.

In spite of the truth that some of the specimens were old and “a bit leathery,” Miller and her team had the ability to identify their amino acid and protein compositions, heavy metal concentrations, and stable isotope ratios.

The algae’s nitrogen stable isotopes were of particular interest to the researchers. Algae soak up nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients from seawater like sponges. When nitrogen is plentiful in their environment, it is reflected in the nitrogen material of their tissues.

The researchers analyzed the nitrogen steady isotopes from pressings of Gelidium, a type of red algae, and compared it to records going back to 1946 of upwelling– an oceanic phenomenon in which wind moves warm surface water away from the coast, driving cold, nutrient-rich water up from the deep.

The changes they observed in the Gelidium’s nitrogen isotope concentrations between 1946 and 2018 associated strongly with historic records of upwelling, which suggested that the nitrogen isotope concentration of each piece of pressed algae was a direct reflection of the quantity of upwelling that happened throughout its growth.

Knowing this, the researchers had the ability to utilize algal specimens to produce a record of upwelling in Monterey Bay starting in 1878, extending the existing record back by almost 70 years.

In doing so, the scientists discovered brand-new information about the sardine fishery collapse in the 1950s that ravaged Monterey’s Cannery Row, whose once-thriving canneries and vibrant individuals influenced John Steinbeck’s books Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. The scientists found proof that in the years leading up to the fishery’s collapse, upwelling in Monterey Bay was reducing– likely due to climatic oscillations. This, combined with overfishing and other factors, they state, triggered Monterey’s sardine stock to crash.

Understanding how changes in upwelling affected fisheries of the past could improve the way fish stocks are handled today states Kyle Van Houtan, primary scientist at the Monterey Bay Fish tank and coauthor of the research study.

“Some species are like a thermometer and reflect what’s taking place in the ocean in their populations. Other types are more durable to environmental forces. The more we understand these relationships, the better we can forecast what the future may entail,” Van Houtan states.

The sort of data that will assist us to much better understand these relationships, Van Houtan states, is all around us– concealing in the tissues of algae, the plumes of birds, and the shells of sea turtles, simply waiting on us to discover it.

Researchers from Japan’s Hokkaido University, for example, recently figured out the density of herring populations off the coast of Hokkaido during the late 19th century by analyzing the chemical composition of century-old algal herbaria.

Using recently established techniques of extracting data from algal pressings, such as isotope analysis and DNA sequencing, scientists have had the ability to determine the effects of anthropogenic toxins on seaside environments, file modifications in marine neighborhood structure, and develop evolutionary trees for a wide range of algal types.

“Old herbaria are more relevant now than ever,” states Suzanne Fredericq, a teacher of biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Old historical collections can tell us so much about the future,” Fredericq says.

Despite this, numerous algal herbarium collections are underused and underfunded. Preserving such collections, Miller states, is crucial to enhancing our understanding of the past, present, and future of our oceans. “There are a lot of other research questions that people could be utilizing these collections to respond to.”

If you want to help answer these concerns, or are just trying to find a brand-new imaginative outlet, Miller suggests using up algae pushing.

“It’s actually fun and simple to do,” Miller states. All you need to begin is some cardboard, a couple of sheets of herbarium paper, a stack of heavy books, and an open mind.

“It’s like pushing flowers, simply a little wetter.”

This short article is from Hakai Publication, an online publication about science and society in seaside ecosystems. Find out more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.