By Sandi Doughton
IT’S OBVIOUS THERE’S something odd about the kelp offshore from Suquamish tribal land. Instead of the jumble of a natural bed, the plants are arrayed in neat rows.
That’s because they sprouted from special cords seeded with spores and pinprick-size baby plants. The cords stretch just above the bottom, strung between concrete blocks like underwater clotheslines.
With their buoyant air bladders, the kelp plants tug the line upward as they grow toward the sunlight, says Hilary Hayford, who’s surveying the scene from a converted lobster boat pressed into service for the expedition. As habitat research director for the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, Hayford is here to help evaluate the nonprofit’s efforts to cultivate kelp in the wild.
It’s been a lot of trial and error, she says — largely because bull kelp’s life cycle is so complex. Plants that can reach 70 feet long originate as microscopic male and female gametes that combine to form the teensy precursors of towering algae. Bull kelp is an annual plant, which means the entire cycle repeats every year. Maturing plants can grow nearly 2 feet a day.
After fine-tuning their laboratory propagation techniques and determining that late winter is the best time to “outplant,” Hayford and her team were successful in getting plants to grow here last year. They’re repeating the experiment this year with four times as much kelp.
“The seeding was wildly successful,” she says.
What they haven’t been able to do is create self-sustaining populations that reproduce on their own. “We don’t know how much kelp you need to put in place before it’s creating enough (spores) for the next year,” Hayford says, pulling on a wet suit. She drops her paddleboard into the water and climbs on, rowing quickly to join a group of divers working among the fronds.
Also poised to slip into the water is University of Chicago ecologist Cathy Pfister, who has been studying some of Washington’s healthiest kelp forests around Neah Bay. Now she wants to compare plants from flourishing beds to those from more marginal areas.
The idea is to look for physiological and metabolic differences or shifts in the microbial communities that live on the kelp and might be as crucial to plant health as gut microbes are to human health, Pfister explains, adjusting her mask and snorkel before taking the plunge.
When the researchers return to the boat, neither is optimistic this will be the season the farmed kelp reproduces on its own.