Harvesters are having to travel farther and farther to find the seaweed, which is an important traditional food source.
This dried, black seaweed has a light green color that traditional harvesters say isn’t normal and “tastes off.” Irene Dundas has harvested black seaweed her whole life – near Kake when she was young and near Ketchikan as an adult. The harvest happens in May when the seaweed is exactly the right size. Dundas and family members travel by boat to specific large rocks far from shore. It must be low tide so they can pull the seaweed off the rocks.
Dundas harvests about 50 gallons to share with family and friends. Processing is lengthy, drying the seaweed into bite-sized pieces. To get any good seaweed this year, she traveled for hours by boat near the Canadian border. Her past harvests, she threw away.Keolani Booth has similarly concerns. He collects black seaweed on the outer waters near Metlakatla and southern Prince of Wales Island.
“It’s a very hard seaweed to try to cultivate,” Booth said. “It’s very sensitive, which you know, you realize that in the open ocean, it’s a precursor to all the things that are stronger in the ocean.” “These heat waves are kind of unprecedented,” said Clark. “They just cause disruptions in life cycles and disturbances in the intertidal, which most of the seaweeds that you find are intertidal-subtidal, so they’re getting extreme changes in their habitat.”
Wet black seaweed dries on tables outside. It will be ground into bite-sized pieces. Harvesters in Southeast Alaska collect it by the gallons.
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