The Uphill Battle to Save the West's Kelp
The large brown algae is uniquely hard to preserve. It's also uniquely important. This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine . Kelp is common along temperate shorelines around the world. For millennia, this large brown algae has been vital to coastal Indigenous peoples. In Washington State and British Columbia, kelp is a traditional food source, a focus for commercial cultivation, and a habitat for endangered and threatened species such as rockfish and young salmon. Its hard to overstate kelps value. For the Jamestown SKlallam Tribe, says the shellfish biologist Annie Raymond, you cant quantify how important this biodiversity is, culturally. But over the past few decades, warming water and other factors have been killing kelps across the Salish Sea. So this summer, in an ongoing effort to build an emergency fund for kelps and to ensure kelps future in the tribes traditional territory, Raymond and her team will be hunting for kelp sporescolloquially called seedsin the Strait of Juan de Fuca. To face the pressing need to preserve kelp biodiversity, the Jamestown SKlallam Tribe is partnering with the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF) and other tribes, universities, and organizations to expand a seed bank for Washington kelps, as part of the Puget Sound Kelp Conservation and Recovery Plan. Begun in 2010 by researchers at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, the existing seed bank houses a collection of bull-kelp spores from the Washington coast. Currently, the spores are housed in Wisconsin, but in the coming months, the collection will be moved to a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries research station in Manchester, Washington. The expanding seed bank, Raymond says, is designed to preserve vulnerable kelp species for future restoration. Although the tribe will collect only spores along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the seed bank allows the tribe to contribute to habitat protection, she says. We want to help build resilience across the region. The PSRF will also contribute to the seed bank, sampling sites along the Washington coast. Read: Kelp is weirdly great at sucking carbon out of the sky Jodie Toft, PSRFs deputy director, says its taken years to build the infrastructure necessary to house such a precious resource at the Manchester Research Station for the long haul. Although the seed bank will house thousands of samples in a refrigerator no bigger than one in a typical kitchen, we needed to make sure that our kelp lab was going to be able to keep the seed bank alive, Toft says. Unlike with many terrestrial-plant seeds, which can be dried and stored for decades and remain viable, storing kelp for extended periods is more complex. To reproduce, Raymond explains, kelps release zoospores that develop into male and female gametophytes. To keep them viable, scientists store kelp gametophytes under red light, in low-iron environments, or in a freezer, which puts them in a kind of arrested development. This means the new bank needs to keep conditions tightly controlled, with emergency measures in case the power goes out. The PSRF seed bank is just one of several kelp-seed banks in California, Oregon, Alaska, and British Columbia. Liam Coleman, a plant biologist at Simon Fraser University who is working to start another kelp-seed bank in British Columbia, says theres an urgent need to make and maintain these kinds of biobanks: The number-one priority is just to make sure that biodiversity is backed up. By preserving genetic diversity, scientists hope to give species the best chance they can to cope with future environmental challenges. Read: Climate change could destroy even the oceans most pristine parks Seed banks will also give people in the future a chance to reforest kelps with the same genes that existed in the region in the first place, maximizing the chances that kelps will thrive. The gold standard for restoration is to replicate what was lost in the place where it was lost, Toft says. Raymond hopes restoration in the future wont be necessarybut if it is, and if all goes as planned, the Jamestown SKlallam Tribe will be able to access the seed bank even 50 or 100 years in the future. Its not just the Jamestown SKlallam who will benefit. Todd Woodard, the infrastructure-and-resources executive director of the Samish Indian Nation, says that in Samish territory, kelp populations declined by 36 percent from 2006 to 2016. Woodward expects that his community will use the seed bank to reseed some of their restoration sites. As NOAAs Manchester seed bank nears completion, the Jamestown SKlallam Tribe will have to make crucial decisions about which kelp species to preserve. We know bull kelp will be one, Raymond says, but there are also a number of understory kelps that we want to study. Time, however, is already running short for Salish Sea kelps. Biodiversity is still high in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but other parts of Puget Sound have already lost nearly all of their bull kelp, and for some remaining populations, genetic diversity is exceedingly low. Thats why Raymond knows they need to work fast. The tribe has countless cultural resources that are intertwined with kelp, she says. You dont know whats going to happen in the future.