Research highlights potential of fast-growing seaweed
Ireland may be famous for its green grass but scientists have discovered a night-growing Irish seaweed could be just as bountiful.
It has been a staple of the Japanese diet for centuries but researchers have discovered that native seaweed is suitably fast-growing to be farmed to be fed to humans and animals like cows.
One Co Clare herd of cows regularly snack on seaweed as they have to cross through Atlantic waters to get to fresh pastures.
The Irish researchers have found sea lettuce, a fast-growing seaweed with excellent nutritional value for animal feed and industrial uses, could return higher yields when the right strains are used.
They also found that sea lettuce strains possess a unique 24-hour growth pattern with higher growth rates during the night than during the light period.
The first study of its kind, which was published in Plant Physiology, analysed 50 seaweed strains of sea lettuce, mostly from Ireland to find which strains were the fastest growing.
Antoine Fort from the Ryan Institute and School of Natural Sciences at NUI Galway said this kind of process has been carried out on staples such as potatoes for millenia but never on seaweed.
“10,000 years ago, we started to select the best potatoes and grow them over and over again so you can produce a better crop,” said Dr Fort.
“The study paves the way towards the domestication and breeding of elite strains of seaweed blooms called [Ulva] for aquaculture, similar to what has been done for crop plants since the beginning of agriculture.
“That hasn’t really been done with seaweed, at least in Europe. The idea is to look at loads of different seaweeds and see if there is potential to make them grow faster just by selecting the best.
No one knew if it was the case with seaweeds and it is. Between individual seaweeds, you can multiply the yield by three if you select the right one. It is the breakthrough.
He said there is potential to feed it to animals.
“I’ve seen seaweed mixed with fodder like hay to be fed to livestock”, said Dr Fort.
“People buy it as food in Portugal but in Ireland it is still fairly local. I don’t think it has reached the supermarket shelves yet but there is no reason why it wouldn’t. It tastes lovely.”
While the seaweed does not necessarily have to be growing in the ocean, it does need sea water.
“You can take a piece of it and put it in the tank and it will keep growing,” he said.
