Southeast Alaska

Talking to Matt Kern, co-founder of Barnacle Foods, a company taking great care to observe and learn from the kelp beds of Southeast Alaska, the current bull kelp beds show a similar distribution and could, in fact, be more robust than those a century ago. Barnacle Foods’ efforts to map the kelp beds around Juneau will create a critical database, as kelp mapping activities are doing elsewhere, to inform efforts to nurture and preserve the wild beds of bull kelp and support the growing Alaskan kelp farming enterprises. 

The west-facing coastal alcove of Sitka Sound is where western science got its first named Nereocystis luetkeana. From 1826 to 1829, amidst the exploitive ventures of the fur trade, a Russian exploratory expedition was the first to collect samples of the great Nereocystis from the Pacific coast of North America. The corvette Seniavin, under the command of Captain Fedor Petrovich Lütke, plied the shores of Alaska, surveying and collecting specimens, especially seaweeds from Sitka Sound. The lead naturalist was Dr. Karl Heinrich Mertens, but another, Alexander Postels, demonstrated a genius for sketching and an affinity for the extraordinary seaweeds found along the Alaskan coast. In 1840, in partnership with the botanist Franz Joseph Ruprecht, Postels created one of the most extraordinary folios of marine algae of all time, Illustrationes algarum.

Postels imbues each lithograph with all the grandeur each marine alga deserves. But even the enormous page size of the “elephant folio” could not contain the mature Nereocystis, which he depicts wrapped around itself creating a crown complete with tiny holdfast holding its rock. Bull kelp was officially described in the Postels and Ruprecht publication and was given the species name Nereocystis luetkeana by Mertens, commemorating the leadership and scientific zeal of their commander. Mertens notes with delight the astonishing bull kelp (at that time called simply Fuci) as seen for the first time in Norfolk Sound, as Sitka Harbor was then called: “Norfolk Sound is equally rich in beautiful Fuci as in rare and remarkable marine animals; and I doubt if a more delightful strand for sea-weeds is to be found … one was too remarkable to be passed over in silence. The more so, as it is quite a feature of Norfolk Sound.” Mertens describes the lower stipe as thin as “packthread” and used locally and throughout the Aleutians as fishing line, the great upper cylinder of the stipe used as a container, or siphon, to bail water out of a canoe or “baidarkas.” He notes that the Russians call this seaweed “sea otter cabbage,” remarking how otters make “particular choice of this seaweed, as its favorite refuge and residence; delighting to rock and sleep on the long cylindrical bladders, which, like enormous sea-serpents, float on the surface of the water and individually sweep between the little islands, rendering the channels impassable for boats.”

Sitka Sound today has bull kelp, more newly established giant kelp, otters, sunflower sea stars, sea urchins as well as pinto abalone. Peril Strait, the long narrow passage carving into the belly of Chichagof Island behind Sitka, has massive beds of bull kelp, a bounty that Californians hope to restore to their shores someday.

The cold and calm waters of Southeast Alaska and up into Prince William Sound offer the right conditions for kelp farming. The nutrient-rich waterways, sounds, coves and inlets that is the mosaic of SE and South Central Alaska coastline are sheltered from the dynamic wave action of an open coast like California and can protect the lines and buoys (home base for the growing kelp) from blowing away or being destroyed, as well as provide the key ingredient to speedy kelp growth—cold ocean. The Alaska Sea Grant program, as well as a number of Indigenous advocacy programs, such as The Native Conservancy, are encouraging local kelp farms. There is a lot of promise, with about 25–30 kelp farms in operation throughout Alaska. But there is also risk. The market for kelp products is still being created, and the distances in Alaska are significant; wet kelp is heavy and bulky, so drying and processing must happen near the farm site. Emphasis can be on farming kelp for local distribution as food amenity to elders and families but it is important to keep track of young families and communities moving into this space—which is getting so much hype and imbued with so much potential—to make sure they make ends meet in the end.

Alaska and Maine are in the kelp farming world together. They share cold water and protected coastlines but they also share a native kelp that is perfect for farming. Sugar kelp, or Saccharina latissima, is a huge-bladed, flouncy, golden beauty of a kelp, with a short stipe and plenty of good tasting blade that grows quickly, and can  be dried and transformed into a number of kelp products, from bovine feed to soil supplements to umami-flavored meal enhancements. Bull kelp on the other hand, has never been the go-to farmed kelp or seaweed. It had a cultivation handbook created in the 1990s to explain how to inoculate the seeded twine and grow lines by propagating the wild sori patches in the lab, but bull kelp farming never had strong commercial possibilities associated with it. One copy of the book exists.