{"id":23861,"date":"2018-05-29T00:05:26","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T07:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=23861"},"modified":"2023-11-17T14:24:47","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T22:24:47","slug":"a-fish-called-rockweed","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/a-fish-called-rockweed\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fish Called Rockweed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among Rachel Carson\u2019s many literary virtues is this: she was a keen observer of seaweed. In The Edge of the Sea<\/em>, Carson\u2019s 1955 ode to America\u2019s Eastern Seaboard, she extolled the \u201csmooth and satiny\u201d tendrils of horsetail kelp, the \u201cfleshy, amber-colored tubers\u201d of sea potato, the \u201cpaper-thin layers\u201d of dulse. Scraps of Porphyra<\/em>, she wrote, resembled \u201clittle pieces of brown transparent plastic cut out of someone\u2019s raincoat.\u201d<\/p>\n

No intertidal dweller captured Carson\u2019s imagination like Ascophyllum nodosum<\/em>, a rubbery, olive-colored, ubiquitous macroalgae known widely on the Atlantic coast as rockweed. The biologist was most enchanted by rockweed\u2019s double life\u2014how its identity changed with the tides. When the ocean withdrew from the Maine beach, she noted, the seaweed lay limp; when the tide returned, the submerged plants stood erect, \u201crising and swaying with a life borrowed from the sea.\u201d The diversity of these undersea jungles, whose canopies sometimes stretch taller than two meters, enthralled Carson. \u201cSmall fishes swim, passing between the weeds as birds fly through a forest, sea snails creep along the fronds, and crabs climb from branch to branch,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

We are accustomed to thinking of seaweed as a stage, the undulant backdrop against which play the dramas of more charismatic fish and shellfish. Today, however, rockweed stars as lead actor in one of Maine\u2019s strangest resource conflicts. Although seaweed harvesting is hardly a new industry\u2014New England\u2019s farmers have nourished their fields with \u201csea manure\u201d for centuries\u2014rockweed has lately become a valuable commercial product, an ingredient in everything from fertilizers to pet foods to nutritional supplements. In 2017, Maine\u2019s rockweeders gathered nearly nine million kilograms and raked in over US $600,000, roughly four times the haul in 2001.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, not everyone is thrilled about the boom. As rockweed\u2019s profile has grown, the controversy over its management has escalated, ascending through Maine\u2019s legal system all the way to the chambers of the state\u2019s supreme court. This seaweed struggle, and the fate of A. nodosum <\/em>itself, hinges on a single question, patently absurd yet bizarrely complex: is rockweed, in defiance of logic and biology, really a fish?<\/p>\n

\n

More than two decades after Rachel Carson published The Edge of the Sea<\/em>, another marine biologist developed a fascination with Maine\u2019s littoral dwellers. In the 1980s, an eighth-generation Mainer named Robin Hadlock Seeley began her doctoral research on a small yellow snail called the smooth periwinkle. Seeley soon discovered that periwinkles\u2019 shells had become squatter and thicker over the 20th century, an adaptive defense against invasive European green crabs. To better study the snails\u2019 evolutionary trajectory, Seeley traveled to Maine\u2019s Cobscook Bay, a wonderland of sheer cliffs and scrubby spruce just kilometers from the Canadian border. She found periwinkles galore, fell in love with the bay, and bought a plot of land on which she later built a home. \u201cIt was an incredible living laboratory,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"Rockweed<\/a>

Unlike a plant, rockweed, which is macroalgae, has no roots, stem, or vascular system. Photo by Robert F. Bukaty\/AP Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Seeley\u2019s bliss wouldn\u2019t last. In 1999, a fleet of blue skiffs arrived in Cobscook Bay: rockweed boats dispatched by a Nova Scotia company called Acadian Seaplants Limited. The crews toted long-handled rakes with cutting blades, which they used to scoop up and carry off rockweed in dripping heaps. \u201cIt made no sense,\u201d recalls Seeley, today a marine ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. \u201cThis seaweed is the base of the food web. It\u2019s important for fisheries, important for wildlife.\u201d She feared for her periwinkles, a species which, Carson wrote, \u201cknows no other home\u201d besides rockweed. \u201cThey were hacking away at the habitat of the species I was trying to study,\u201d Seeley sniffs, the wound still fresh.<\/p>\n

Incensed, Seeley and other community members organized the Rockweed Coalition, a feisty group that fought to restrict cutting. The coalition won, sort of: in 2009, Maine\u2019s legislature passed a law<\/a> that divided Cobscook Bay into sectors and prevented harvesters from hauling away more than 17 percent of the rockweed from any given area each year. Yet the rest of Maine remained lightly regulated. State rules required cutters to trim above the lowest branches and no closer than 40 centimeters from the holdfast\u2014the sturdy foot with which rockweed grips the shore\u2014to allow the plants to regrow after each haircut. Otherwise, regulations were scant.<\/p>\n

In part, that\u2019s because Maine was vexed by a fundamental quandary: who owned rockweed anyway?<\/p>\n

The source of that confusion dates to 1641, a time when present-day Maine was a remote outpost of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The government of the young English settlement, which was reliant on maritime commerce, hoped to build more wharves for merchants to dock their ships. To spur construction, lawmakers shifted ownership of the colony\u2019s tidal flats from the king to private landowners, eventually kick-starting the infrastructure boom that turned Boston Harbor into an economic powerhouse.<\/p>\n

Although the transfer was a gift to the wealthy\u2014Maine and Massachusetts are among the only states<\/a> with private intertidal zones\u2014it contained an egalitarian loophole allowing the public to use the flats for \u201cfishing, fowling, and navigation.\u201d Today, that rule permits a residual foraging economy in a state that\u2019s 94 percent private property. You may not live in an oceanfront mansion, but you can gather clams or net herring anyway.<\/p>\n

\"intertidal<\/a>

In Cobscook Bay, Maine, locals successfully campaigned in 2009 for restrictions to the annual rockweed harvest. Photo by Jim Kidd\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

As coastal recreation evolved, Mainers\u2019 access rights expanded. In 1952, a court permitted digging marine worms under the fishing provision; in 2011, another court decided that scuba diving qualified as navigation. Maine\u2019s rockweed industry hinged on a similarly liberal interpretation of the ancient colonial rules. Cutting rockweed wasn\u2019t fishing\u2014but neither was worm digging, when you thought about it. Still, seaweed\u2019s legal status remained murky. Did it belong to coastal landowners? Or was it a public resource, \u201cfishable\u201d for everyone from artisanal gatherers to international corporations?<\/p>\n

The abstruse battle raged on. The Rockweed Coalition enrolled more than 500 properties in its \u201cno-cut rockweed registry,\u201d a list of parcels owned by people who disapproved of the harvest, though they had no legal power to stop it. In December 2015, Carl and Kenneth Ross, conservation-minded brothers whose family had owned land in the town of Pembroke for a century, finally decided to settle the issue, suing Acadian Seaplants for cutting their flats. An organization of other homeowners joined the suit. The seaweed, the plaintiffs insisted, was theirs\u2014and they would go to court to prove it.<\/p>\n

Who owns rockweed, however, is really a secondary question. First, you have to settle what it is<\/em>. \u201cProperty law has always made a distinction between plants and animals,\u201d says Gordon Smith, the Rosses\u2019 attorney. Animals, Smith points out, are itinerant, unrooted, heedless of property borders; thus they belong to no one, or, more properly, everyone. \u201cWhereas plants are attached to the ground,\u201d Smith adds, \u201cand as a result are held to be the property of the landowner.\u201d After all, you couldn\u2019t hop a fence into your neighbor\u2019s backyard and saw down her maples.<\/p>\n

But rockweed does not fit easily into existing categories. On one hand, it\u2019s an anchored, photosynthesizing organism that, as Carson lyrically observed, forms forest-like expanses of cover\u2014more akin to poplar than pollock. On the other, rockweed\u2019s holdfast attaches to rock, not soil, meaning\u2014as Acadian Seaplants\u2019 lawyers are fond of pointing out\u2014it draws nourishment from \u201cpublic intertidal waters,\u201d not from private ground. Yes, it spends its adult life adhered to a single spot; so does an oyster. In its habits and habitat, Acadian Seaplants wrote in one brief, \u201crockweed is indistinguishable from intertidal shellfish.\u201d In fact, although it\u2019s informally called a plant, it\u2019s technically algae and falls under a different kingdom altogether.<\/p>\n

Those arguments didn\u2019t sway Judge Harold Stewart II, who in March 2017 sided with the homeowners. Rockweed harvesting, he wrote, is \u201cno more a fishing activity\u00a0\u2026\u00a0than is harvesting a tree the same as hunting or trapping wildlife.\u201d<\/a> Acadian Seaplants appealed, bumping the case up to Maine\u2019s supreme court, which may rule this spring. It appears to be the first time a state\u2019s highest court has concerned itself with the ecological properties of seaweed.<\/p>\n

\n

Although rockweed\u2019s legal status depends on an obscure snippet of colonial law, its fate has also become a case study for broader conservation questions. In November, the Property and Environment Research Center, a think tank based in distant Bozeman, Montana, whose mission is promoting \u201cfree market environmentalism,\u201d weighed in on the saga in a Portland Press Herald<\/em> op-ed<\/a>. Defining rockweed as private property, the center wrote, would give landowners \u201cthe incentive to ensure that any harvesting is sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n

It might seem strange that an institute headquartered in the Northern Rockies would concern itself with New England\u2019s seaweed. But the center\u2019s op-ed was consistent with its advocacy for catch shares, a controversial fisheries management system that seeks to preserve stocks by granting fishermen a guaranteed portion of the total catch. The rockweed dilemma, the center seems to believe, has a similar solution: the best way to save a marine resource is to privatize it.<\/p>\n

Your browser does not support the video element.<\/p><\/video>\n

In the water, rockweed provides habitat for crustaceans, fish, and mollusks; out of the water, it\u2019s food for people and animals, fertilizer, and a soil conditioner. Video by davidobrown.com<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the folks who take umbrage with that notion is Dave Olsen, a rockweed harvester who penned a fierce rebuttal<\/a> to the center\u2019s letter.<\/em> Rockweed, he argued, \u201cbelongs in the public trust, along with the other living things in the sea\u201d\u2014owned by the people, accessible to all. He\u2019d come by his anti-privatization views through hard experience. Although Olsen is a descendent of Maine fishermen, his own fishing career began in Alaska, where he gill-netted sockeye salmon. When he returned several years ago, he discovered Maine\u2019s marine economy was closed to him. Baby eels? The fishery had been off-limits to new entrants since 2013; when it finally reopened, his odds of winning the license lottery were less than one percent<\/a>. Urchins? Conservation laws effectively shut out new divers. Sure, he could work as a sternman on a lobster boat, but he figured it would take him 20 years to become eligible to captain his own vessel.<\/p>\n

Rockweed was his only viable option. Olsen contracted with Acadian Seaplants, earning around $43.50 for every wet tonne he raked in. He quickly came to love the work\u2014the calm dawn sea, the satisfying flop of seaweed as it slid off the tines of his rake, the way each haul engaged his back and legs. \u201cI think of it as exercise for money,\u201d he says. \u201cWe heap these boats up and creak back to the dock really slowly. It looks like someone is driving a mountain of seaweed over the water. It\u2019s a great feeling, having a boatload.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olsen, a self-described \u201craging radical leftist environmentalist,\u201d harbors not the slightest concern about the sustainability of his resource. \u201cWe\u2019re harvesting in the same places year in and year out,\u201d he says. \u201cThe recovery of the biomass is incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some research backs him up: scientists at the University of Maine have suggested that because rockweed has evolved to rapidly bounce back after damage from waves, ice, and other stressors, harvesters could sustainably haul away up to 20 percent of Maine\u2019s rockweed each year. (The Maine Department of Marine Resources estimates that annual harvest rates sit at just one percent.) Other biologists have found that cutting rockweed actually causes it to grow faster<\/em>. Robin Seeley and others counter that rockweed tends to regrow as dense, low bushes rather than meters-long streamers, perhaps diminishing its value for the 150 or so critters that rely on it for food and shelter. That\u2019s partly why the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has recommended restricting harvest near dozens of sensitive islands and beaches where harlequin ducks, purple sandpipers, eiders, and other birds hunt invertebrates within rockweed fronds. \u201cMy department is not against rockweed harvest,\u201d says Lindsay Tudor, the biologist whose shorebird studies informed the prospective closures. \u201cWe\u2019d just like a precautionary approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olsen doesn\u2019t draw his entire income from rockweed\u2014<\/em>like everyone else in Washington County, one of the poorest corners of Maine, he has plenty of side hustles, such as cutting the tips off balsam fir branches to make wreaths in winter. Still, he\u2019s decided to up his investment in seaweed. He recently won a grant from the Maine Technology Institute to set up an independent harvesting operation and develop more efficient equipment, an arrangement he hopes will double his earnings.<\/p>\n

In Ireland, another place where Acadian Seaplants has an active rockweed operation, the company\u2019s staunchest foes are small-scale, traditional harvesters who fear being squeezed out. Likewise, Olsen worries that privatization, which would require him to secure permission to cut from intertidal landowners, could harm his nascent business: it\u2019s easier for a large corporation to negotiate with dozens of property holders than it is for a single man. \u201cThere\u2019s still going to be an industry,\u201d if the supreme court rules on the side of the landowners, he says, \u201cbut it would very much restrict my ability to produce independently.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"boat<\/a>

A harvester loads his skiff full of rockweed in Maine. Photo by Jim Kidd\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Others put more stock in Mainers\u2019 congeniality. \u201cThere\u2019s a long history of people allowing their property to be used for [others] to make a living, as long as there\u2019s a mutual respect,\u201d says Sean Mahoney, director of Maine\u2019s Conservation Law Foundation. Every fall, for instance, Mahoney grants hunters permission to kill deer on his land\u2014proof, he says, that private property need not violate the spirit of the public trust. \u201cI think Maine is a small enough state where that one-on-one kind of relationship matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, the rockweed problem has proved only divisive, even within Maine\u2019s famously tight-knit coastal communities. While some fishermen fear that seaweed harvesting destroys habitat, the Downeast Lobstermen\u2019s Association has taken the opposite approach, arguing in a brief on behalf of Acadian Seaplants that rockweed is a \u201csustainable and reliable way for Maine lobstermen to diversify their business\u201d in the face of environmental change. \u201cI don\u2019t think we want to be a state where people just sit on their decks and look at the scenery,\u201d quips Merritt Carey, a sternman and lawyer who now serves as Acadian Seaplants’ Maine director. \u201cWorking waterfronts are a huge part of our heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Carey is a relative newcomer to the rockweed wars\u2014she\u2019s only been on the job for a year\u2014her fresh eyes are in some ways advantageous. Where more entrenched industry reps have courted conflict, she sees the potential for reconciliation. Last fall, Carey, Mahoney, and others began planning a so-called Seaweed Roundtable<\/a>, a forum for conservationists and harvesters to hash out the industry\u2019s ground rules.<\/p>\n

Robin Seeley, Acadian Seaplants\u2019 most persistent opponent, is also amenable to compromise. She proposes extending the Cobscook Bay deal to the entire Maine coast\u2014instating hard cutting caps, closing off conservation areas, and divvying the coastline into sectors to ensure that no regions get clear-cut.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll other life,\u201d Rachel Carson wrote, \u201cexists within [rockweed\u2019s] shelter.\u201d For years, harvesters and landowners have argued over what rockweed isn\u2019t<\/em>\u2014not quite a plant, certainly not a fish\u2014rather than agreeing on what it is: an organism and a habitat, fundamental to an ecosystem and to an industry. Long after the supreme court has ruled on rockweed\u2019s ownership, Maine will be left with the far greater challenge of governing its most confounding coastal species\u2014a flowing, floating testament to the truth that all coastal creatures are interconnected, humans included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among Rachel Carson\u2019s many literary virtues is this: she was a keen observer of seaweed. In The Edge of the Sea, Carson\u2019s 1955 ode to America\u2019s Eastern Seaboard, she extolled the \u201csmooth and satiny\u201d tendrils of horsetail kelp, the \u201cfleshy, <\/p>\n

…<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":23862,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"In Maine, a strange legal debate is raging over rights to the state\u2019s most important seaweed.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15453]}],"word_count_override":"2,300 words, about 12 minutes","podbean1":"m8u57j\/A_Fish_Called_Rockweed.mp3","podbean2":"c8bck-9220b9","redirect":"","geolocation":{"address":"44.909983, -67.070311","lat":44.909983,"lng":-67.070311},"related":[16184,30528],"twitterimage":23863,"facebookimage":23864,"twitterdescription":"Who owns Maine\u2019s most important seaweed?","edited":"","factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/23861"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_features"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/23861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43726,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/23861\/revisions\/43726"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/30528"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}