If you haven't yet heard of seaweed farming, you're soon going to be hearing a lot about it. Hailed as a way both to remove planet-warming carbon dioxide from the environment and grow sustainable food and other products, seaweed farming could be key to maintaining a stable climate future.
But challenges have arisen in trying to expand seaweed farms. These include, but are not limited to, fluctuations in oceanic conditions, the proliferation of disease, and limitations in nutrient availability.
It's a major discovery, then, that microbes might be the key to making seaweed more resilient. A new study, published in the journal Green Carbon, details how the microscopic organisms that live on seaweed could make industrial-scale seaweed farming possible.
"A diverse community of microbes live on seaweed, much like probiotics for seaweed — specific microbes can protect seaweed from diseases, provide essential nutrients, and help them thrive in challenging conditions," Yongyu Zhang, one of the lead researchers, said in a news release via EurekAlert.
These challenging oceanic conditions — including rising temperatures and acidification — are due primarily to the increase in carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases generated by human activity. In short, they are challenges that are expected to persist, which means they must be navigated in order to make seaweed farming at scale a reality.
"Early life stages of seaweeds, being more susceptible to microbial colonization, present a critical window for establishing beneficial microbes that might persist throughout the seaweed's life cycle," fellow author Shailesh Nair said. "Some seaweeds can even pass these beneficial microbes to their offspring, suggesting potential long-term benefits across generations."
And by conducting further research, the team emphasized, they could help create a "framework for future seaweed microbiome manipulation" that could empower truly sustainable farming.
"By harnessing the power of beneficial microbes, farmers could potentially create more stable and productive seaweed farms, making large-scale ocean farming more feasible than ever before," Zhang said.
Seaweed is an impressively versatile material, able to serve as everything from food to fertilizer, bioplastic packaging, animal feed, biofuel, and more. Nutritionally, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, seaweed is an excellent source of both dietary fiber, promoting gut health, as well as disease-preventing components, including carotenoids and omega-3 fatty acids.
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Grocery stores 🛒 Ocean farming — of both seaweed and shellfish — also offers a much more efficient, non-pollutive approach to growing food than traditional meat-based farming does. And because this form of agriculture naturally captures ocean-based carbon dioxide and restores healthy ecosystems, it's arguably one of the most planet-friendly ways for humans to grow food.
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