 My name is Brian Weiser. I am a professor of biology in the chair of the department of biology Rebiology and environmental science and it is a real pleasure to welcome Josie Islund here this evening And I'm so glad so many of you are here So that you can see some of the fascinating things that Josie is going to share with us It's I it is it is an enormous Pleasure, I don't think you could possibly understand how cool it is to have Josie here And I discovered her first book. There's a copy of it in the back back in 2014 And I will tell you it changed the way that I teach Because her work is so cool and in the Venn diagram of Josie Islund and Brian Weiser We are like hugely overlapping But we got here from very different pathways and so Josie's going to share some of that with you today But before we move on I did want to acknowledge our sponsors This is Supported by a number of different organizations one is the RISE scholarship program, which I'll talk a little bit about just a second I want to thank Betsy Lerner and talking beyond the library series Which has supported this in large part here honors program the department of biology and the M&S seminar series all Help to get Josie here today to share her work I just wanted to quickly acknowledge The NSF grant that is also supporting this work This was a it's called a scholarships in science technology engineering and math program And this is a program that awards scholarships to students And the the tenants of the program are to address the need for high-quality STEM workforce and STEM disciplines It funds scholarships and advances the adaptation implementation and study of effective evidence-based curricular and co-curricular activities Support recruitment retention transfer student. Okay. This is a great program. It's a scholarship program But it's also a research study and the PIs on this are Dr. Palm who's in the back and Karen Bellotti who's the Writing Center director of the tutoring center Tracy McDonald wiser who is the coordinator for the Science Center who's not here What our research question is is does programming and science communication improve retention graduation and placement into STEM careers and so part of the reason that we have Josie is just because there's some algae guy who knows her work but because We it's part of the programming of facilitating science communication and learning the importance of science communication And we know we have a very strong need to communicate effectively to that in a very strong need for the public non-technical audiences a lot of public's interest in science but Understand science because it's good for society. This is something that our national government recognizes in Implementing programs like this as STEM program and we are thrilled that we get to be part of this program support student work and Test this idea that science communication is something that will help people to identify in the field Stick with it get jobs in it and move our society forward So as I said Josie's first book on the left here in Ocean Guard in the secret life of seaweed I was published in 2014 That's when I became aware of Josie's work and what I absolutely loved about Josie's work is that it is a very welcoming Entry into a discipline that a lot of people go. Oh, I gotta take a class on seaweed I take some convincing of your parents a lot of money to take a class on on seaweed Because the way we often hear about it is the dead stuff that washes up on the shore and then it smells and you know, it's like Not Josie Yislin's work. It is fantastic. It's breathtaking. It's really cool So she's gonna tell us about that and she just came out of the new book that explores several different species and much greater detail Tells some stories about it. It's called the curious world of seaweed and that's what we're here to hear about today But so by way of introduction, I did want to just say highlight a few things about this book If you haven't read it yet, it's been described as a mesmerizing swim through a liminal world Remarkable mixture of photos and writing and important work. Well done Adventure through art science and pure pleasure Which I could not agree more. It's fantastic. So Josie's a photographer it has, you know, full art installations and She's also a designer. I would say So here's some of her work has been used on beauty products Scarves and I believe that is the scarf that Josie is wearing today. So you can check this out So how many architecture people do we have in here today? Alright, so all you guys have to go to your Archey friends and tell them about how seaweed is making it into the design of a stairwell concept And that's a very new project. I think maybe we'll hear a little bit about that But Josie's also an explorer. She goes out and looks at the world and tries to make some sense to that and bring really interesting narratives to it That's her Instagram feed. Totally check it out. It's awesome And she goes to scientific meetings as well. So former Roger Williams University student who was at a meeting that Josie was also at and so it's just really fun to talk with Josie and sort of We're at this point Where we've arrived to sort of the same Place but from very very different pathways, and I think you'll find it really interesting And if you are interested in following any of the work that we're doing in here from rise you can follow us on Twitter at speaking stem So if you photograph take any portraits, which the specimens in the back, which you should totally do And without further ado, please join me in welcoming Josie Islund Can you guys hear me? Okay. Great. So I'm actually going to stand out here So I am so delighted to be here at Roger Williams. This is really one of my favorite places to be Brian is just amazing I think there is one graphic design student in the room. So I'm glad, you know this is a place where art and science comes together and That's really my passion is Bringing art and science together and I actually come to the science as a visual artist. I have no formal training in the sciences I got my undergraduate degree in what's called visual and environmental studies from Harvard But that environmental studies has nothing to do with environmental science because in the early 80s Environmental science. I'm not sure it actually existed at Harvard University It was the program I was in was run by a bunch of architects and I spent my entire undergraduate career in the dark room making photographs and weird constructions from photographs And then I worked in the art field of architectural lighting for a little while And I moved to California and then I went back to school to get my MFA. So that's a masters in fine art in photography from San Francisco State University and just as I completed that master's program, which was really Pretty fantastic And I was doing all this work using glass block and transparency and images that looked through images to other images I discovered the use I started using my scanner as a camera and That had a lot to do with that I had a lot of small kids at home and I couldn't be in the dark room and I happened to have bought a scanner with some Of my colleagues that I was doing some collaborative work with and I started putting objects from my world on The scanner and the scanner has become my tool And so what I thought I'd do today is take you a little bit through my journey as an artist into the science of seaweed so when an ocean garden came out I I Came here and I did a talk and I thought I'd kind of really concentrate on my journey since then but it all began with making these very straight-ahead portraits using my scanner of The marine algae that I was finding on our west coast now I also want to say that I am so happy to be here on the east coast. I have lived in San Francisco for a long time now I moved there a couple years after I got out of college and and So I could make a decision when I was putting this talk together as to whether to make the talk more kind of east Co-centric or to really leave it as the presentation that I've been giving quite a few of out in and around San Francisco and California and I decided to leave it a little bit west coast centric because I've noticed that we all there's so much incredible work being done on What's in front of us and what we're encountering in our local local worlds, especially? you know our our near shore ecologies and it's often good to kind of step back and get a broader sense and hear what the Stories are from away from somewhere else and that might give us some perspective on what's happening here, so it's kind of It'll hopefully get you all out to California or get you psyched to go come do some work out in California But that's so so to go back to where Where I started with the seaweeds is I started using my scanner as a camera and way back in 1994 and at one point I was Training to be a docent for one of the new marine protected areas just north of San Francisco called the Duxbury Reef and So I was doing the training to kind of learn what the reef was all about I had made a few books on One was on beach stones and another was on seashells And then I made a book about everything you find at the beach And I wanted to kind of expand what I was looking at so I was taking this docent in class And I noticed that everyone out there the woman who ran it was a nudibranch expert So everyone was looking at the invertebrates and that whoo they were so excited by all these invertebrates and I was noticing that most of what we were looking at Was not being talked about at all and that was the algae So I picked up a scrap and held it up to the sky And I was like oh my god. This is so spectacularly beautiful. It was this incredible magenta color It was this incredible form. I would I have to get this back to my studio and on to my scanner And that started my journey which was very very much of a visual journey at first Into the world of the seaweeds when I was on the on the beach in in California I can't help but pick up these pods these beautiful orange shaped pods. I had no idea what they were Well, now I know that they are the pneumaticist of the macrocystis, which we'll talk about But that's to say that I begin as a visual learner. I did not I was not good at learning names in college So I kind of didn't go into the sciences but I've become impassioned by the seaweeds and so I've stuck with it and I've learned I've learned the science or a tiny bit of it So I've been making these straight-ahead portraits of using my scanner and then since Making the book an ocean garden, which I call kind of a visual primer on marine algae I started printing them on these curtain this curtain material and this is an installation for a gallery in Alameda, California And so I'm able to bring these large Oversize algae into art spaces and into other venues that wouldn't kind of normally encounter marine algae And so just to let you know what we have here. I think I might have a pointer on here maybe this Ah, yeah, so this is a beautiful erythrophilum Which will encounter a little bit more of rosy red the fabulous egregia and we'll encounter that more This is a west coast pulmonary You have something similar and this is the great macrocystis or giant kelp and these are each 94 inches high And hanging in the gallery these curtains have been a fantastic thing for me. They're easy to print. They're easily transported and the the community arts program of the County of Alameda had an empty shopping center that they were trying to revitalize and they asked a bunch of artists to Fill some of the empty storefronts and I was given an old video store And as you know video stores are like dead in the water. This place has been empty for years so I came in with my big algae curtains and Got to fill up the windows. There was a huge festival in that place There was children's performances and bands playing and it was really it was really great And you can even so that's the giant kelp. Here's from the outside The nereocystis is which is one of the stories I'm going to go into in great detail That's our bulk help of Northern California and that pulmonary Yeah, and just having the public encounter these organisms that are so unfamiliar That are really usually hidden beneath the waves It was really thrilling to me as an artist This was a super fun Installation and this happened in the spring of 2018 as you can see there And I was invited by Brian and Amy Carlisle who organized the Northeast Algo societies Conference for that year it was at the University of New Haven and I was asked to come in and do an installation in the gallery space and And give a kind of introductory talk for that conference and the the algal Conferences and and groups the site algal scientists have been so generous and enthusiastic about Inviting me into their world and it's a great honor and pleasure for me to Come and as as Brian said their mantra for that year was broaden your impact So one way is to Is to install this work in ways that was it really kind of enlivened this it was a funny gallery Layout and so what we have here on the curtains is some Botry Euclidia over there this beautiful sea grapes And then a fabulous. I think it's a brown is a cytosiphon. It's like sausages And I just love that one and then I got to do a talk similar to what I'm giving you in the gallery space And that was where all of the conference convened to Start off the conference Another great part of that conference was that I got to make these prints also for the walls that were big fine art prints But they were actually printed in Brian's lab and that's a wonderful Confluence of art and science is that you know science labs have beautiful printers And if you order some good paper I can put some files up on Dropbox and Brian printed out these beautiful files That then ended up having a second life at the big national algal Conference the PSA the Psychological Society of America They hung behind the speakers these prints hung behind the speakers at that conference And then they went into an auction to support scholarships to the conferences and they made a bunch of money for So this kind of play between the fine art and the science is just such it's just a pleasure So as I said, I was using my scanner to make these very straight for one of the things I love about my scanner is it strips away the context And the scale and it lets these organisms really speak for themselves The scanner also gives me a very true color So what you're seeing here is really the color of the algae I kind of bring it to life But I really I like that consistency and if any of you are photographers, you know how weird lighting can be and how It can it can veer from what you're looking at and the scanner It's very true to my specimen that I'm placing on there. This again is that fantastic erythrofilm There's a wonderful Psychologist out at University of British Columbia who has a tattoo of the erythrofilm on his forearm and it's beautiful And lately I've been trying to make these more complex imagery that has a Little bit of abstraction in it But I always want to make this the species or specimen itself Identifiable so I'm mixing that erythrofilm with some preonidas I think here and Maziella's and it's all about the purples and browns coming together Ah, and this is the fabulous Halosakian or sea sacks And Brian has some of these in the back But this is what they look like when they're fresh when they're right off the beach And I have one beach that I walk very regularly in San Francisco And what I've noticed over the many many years that I've been walking is that there are certain days that certain sea Weeds wash up on the beach and every once in a while There's a Halosakian day and and the beaches strewn with these lovely Celadon seaweeds, they're actually in the red category, which we'll get into in a minute, but This you can see they have some of the ocean still with them and the sea sacks are really interesting because As you know these seaweeds exist in the intertidal zone this kind of weird place where their entire world gets stripped away Every six hours and they have to if they're if they're in the higher intertidal They have to kind of survive during that Desiccating period of low tide when the sun and the wind is extremely drying so they all come up with different strategies For surviving that period and the sea sacks hydrate from within it's kind of a different strategy from those really leafy Leafy seaweeds that that dry out and rehydrate so you can see they have whole little oceans Inside of them and that's what I'm able to capture with my scanner So I can put these seaweeds on my scanner wet right out of the right off the beach Or I can put them on after I've dried them in my press This is a fun. This is a to historical Pressing so I'm also able to go into herbaria and scan Pressings from the 1890s these seaweeds have this incredible They're they're very archival they last a long time and their pigments last as well And then I've overlaid this is glowy o siphonia, and it was pressed in 18 in the 1890s Somewhere around 1898. It's from the Monterey Peninsula And it has some other color in there So here's where my my eye as a designer just has so much fun This Masiella volans is a particular spoon shaped. I mean, it's just incredible look at it It's really that purple color and this fabulous spoon shape And I found it one of my first workshops that I took When I started learning the science of seaweed from the curator of marine algae at UC Berkeley Kathy and Miller was that one of the marine the big marine labs near me at bodega marine labs and bodega head and That was way back in 2009 And I found some of the Masiella volans and it's in the book and it skits just beautiful And I never found it again Until two years ago these workshops came back to the bodega head or modega marine labs and there was a beautiful cluster of the Masiella volans and Kathy and pointed out that this seaweed it has a very particular niche that it likes it likes an area of A rocky bottom because all the seaweeds need a rocky bottom to hold on to but it likes a sand scoured area So there I found another batch. I made this image and then I had to pair this incredible purple with this beautiful Olive color of the egregia pods and this I will go into egregia because it's one of my favorites It's one of our really common kelps on the west coast and I was collected I was realizing it has all these whimsical pods and that really the seaweeds deserve a place on our kitchen walls as much as the wildflowers or you know heirloom fruits or you know those posters that you find on your kitchen walls Well, I think the seaweeds deserve a place there And so that was my attempt to make something in that category So this is egregia men's DCI or feather boa kelp and feather boa kelp is as I said one of the Very common kelps you'll find not only on the beach But in the the subtitle to really low intertidal It's a perennial so it's hold fast persists from year to year and out on the Duxbury reef where I first started Really looking for the seaweeds. There are a few hold fasts that I go back to every spring and Summer to kind of see how and fall to see see their cycles The first essay I wrote for the new book was about egregia because I wanted to see if I could write a An essay and I kind of titled it. I think I titled it empathy for a kelp Could I write an essay about a Kelp a kelp that was so odd and so different from anything that we can relate to on what we know from our terrestrial world From vascular plants or anything we encounter in in our our our land-based gravity based world And could I describe it in a way that we really felt connected to it to something so different from us? So that it really does have pride of place as the first chapter This was a specimen again I found on the beach and I'm able to capture this kind of jazzy quality and One of the interesting things about egregia is that it has this incredible range of morphology or shape or form And originally it was thought to be many different species But then it came down to being decided. No, they are all egregia men's ECI Archibald Menzies is who Discovered it or it was the first collector. He was out on the Vancouver expedition to the Pacific Northwest and he was quite a wonderful wonderful collector But you can see this incredible incredible variety This it has this flat midrib and these paddle shaped blades But they can be elongated and almost needle-like or they can be shortened stout The other thing about egregia is egregia is doing very well these days on our west coast It's very adaptable to warmer and colder water and that's pretty remarkable and something I think we're really taking note of for all sorts of species is how adaptable are they to different ocean temperatures? So egregia is Doing really well and then in my life as an artist as opposed to my life as a writer and designer I started thinking, you know, I can explore using just the egregia blades And work as a using them as a collage element and I actually looked to another artist for inspiration here and his name Is Rex Ray and he's a San Francisco based artist who unfortunately died in in 2015 But he was kind of walked this line between graphic design and fine art and he would make these beautiful Organic shapes of paper you'd make paper and cut out these shapes and then collage with them And I thought well, maybe I could do the same thing But I'll use the blades or the various Specimens that I have as those collage elements and it kind of opened up a whole new pathway of art making for me That was kind of freeing and I have to say, you know, if you're an artist or a graphic designer Go out and copy somebody. It's not it. You know, you're always going to be doing it in your own way There was a huge exhibit about Matisse and Diebenkorn in San Francisco where Richard Diebenkorn just was Copying Henri Matisse and came up with all this amazing artwork. It was very important to me I've also been making cyanotype prints And early on I had done some research into Anna Atkins Who is a real hero of mine and has gotten quite a bit of Notoriety lately. She there's a show of her work in New York at the New York Public Library and she was this woman a Victorian woman in around 1840 she made the first Photographically reproduced book and it was a book of algae. It was called British algae cyanotype impressions And she was a collector of the algae Around the coast of her home in Great Britain and then she was experimenting with this very new method Of making imagery. It was very kind of the the nascent photography so in the history of photography cyanotype is one of those very early processes where you make a a Sensitized emulsion that you put on your paper these are really fun and easy to do and I've been doing all these workshops where we where I I Make cyanotypes with people and it's a way to bring the science of the seaweeds I use all my seaweed specimens to talk about the seaweeds as we're making the imagery and Then I realized when I really started thinking about Anna Atkins And I was writing about her for the book because she comes up in the chapter on color There is a tradition in botanical illustration that is called nature printing and that's the process of printing directly from the specimen So botanical illustration is usually looking at the specimen and then drawing Perhaps an idealized version of the specimen, but when you're making an image from the specimen itself You're capturing all the idiosyncrasies of that particular specimen. It's really a portrait of a particular thing And I realized that my scanner with using my scanner I was following in that tradition of nature printing Which Anna Atkins was certainly doing using her making her cyanotype impressions So I have just been recently experimenting with placing one of my scans Into the cyanotype that I have made from that specimen So it's very much about kind of crossing time and place And it's I've got a whole nother body of work That's it's in my head and partly on various hard drives But it's it's kind of some of the next body of work that I'm gonna be working on so when I finished an ocean garden and and I really There will never be you know, I will never get to be enough of the seaweeds I really wanted to dive deeper into particular species and try to tell their stories and what that meant and also try to Understand the world of the taxonomy of seaweeds. We have a big huge book the marine algae of California and 650 species in it and After each name, there's this whole line of People's names and I didn't even I didn't know what that meant really and so I started delving into the taxonomy of the seaweeds that I really loved kind of these iconic Seaweeds and what I found was that taxonomy has a whole Visual part of it this the history of describing these species of Generating these flora has a visual component and that of course is you know, what really Makes me excited. So what you see here are Some of the plates that are folded up to one of the really great first descriptions of California seaweeds And it was written in 1853 by Franz Josef Ruprecht who was a German scientist writing in Russia at the time and a collection of seaweeds from California got sent back to Russia and he named them so the first part is in its five kelps and the seagrass and one seagrass and so you have the descriptions in I think in Russian and Russian I think just in Russian and Latin But then in the back of this of this folio are these folded up lithographs and I got to go find I got to go see the actual book in the library of the UC libraries and This is actually from a PDF that's online actually do you all know that the website algae base? Yeah, oh what a treasure trove. I see people nodding. Yeah, it's fantastic. It has all these old documents, but Ruprecht had these lithographs made and what I found is that when you pulled them out I actually got to encounter some of them at one of these workshops and when you unfolded those those Panels this one of egregia here on the right is taller than me Spectacular and one of the things that comes up that's always a question and is how do you capture these enormous? Majestic seaweeds when they're so big and we're confined to things like pages and Scanners and so Ruprecht decided to put a lot of the panels together and when I encountered these I thought well I would like to work in dialogue with these older Images Because they it creates a conversation of sorts across time and place And this was another very first image where I laid a scan of this particular Brown algae called costaria costata or five ribbed kelp And I laid it on top of another one of the lithographs from that Ruprecht folio Dictio nerum, California They're related. They're not completely the same, but they're they're I think they're in the same family and This to me created started creating this energy kind of like a vector Through time and place and vectors of course have an arrow on them You know from past to present and then it's continuing because that's very much about all of the work We're doing it's like well. Where is this going? Where are these species headed? That's always kind of part of why we're learning what we're learning So that has been really this body of work that that drove the research of the new book So I've been making the artwork alongside the research and writing of This book the curious world of seaweed This is part of that series and this is Pyropia or porphyra Nori And our cow it's been porphyra for many many years and then it got broken down into pyropia and The east coast I know the California ones are now our pyropia The east coast versions. I don't know whether they're porphyra still or pyropia But here I've taken one of my scans and I've laid it on to the lithograph done by another great illustrator named Alexander Postels and Alexander Postels was hired as the surgeon on board a Russian expedition to Alaska that sailed to Alaska in 1829 and He turned out to have this amazing talent for illustration and for sketching And they collected a lot of the seaweeds of Alaska and of course a lot of the seaweeds of Alaska their range Goes all the way down the west coast to Washington, Oregon and California and Postels went back to Russia and in 1840 he published this huge folio called an elephant folio called Illustrationis Algarum and he paired up with Rupert the describer so Rupert described the species in in Russian and Latin and then Postels made these enormous fantastic lithographs And if you are ever at the University of Southern California, this folio exists in their Special collections libraries. You can ask for it. You can sit and spend a whole day with it and it is truly a spectacular experience So I started I was able to get them over a number of years to digitize that And that's what libraries are so amazing about. I can't tell you how much I appreciate libraries and and and what they provide for us From all different disciplines So I was able to get digital files of the postels Illustrationis Algarum lithographs and then to work with them as an artist And in fact, I just sent notice of the book to the librarian who helped me get those files And I got such a lovely note back from her saying this is why we do what we do It's just a lovely lovely report there This is over and over like the porphyra that we just saw is so thin and sheer They're just two cells thick and every single one of those cells can not only photosynthesize But can access all the nutrients of the ocean and that's really different than land placed Land-based plants where everything is differentiated and roots do one thing and leaves do another and trunks Of course have to combat gravity So all that energy has to go into being sturdy The seaweeds just take a different strategy and here these really folios Seaweeds are maximizing their surface area to volume to catch as many photons to power photosynthesis and That there is Diestromatic I think is anyway, it's a word that kind of means to that it to you know two layers And so both of these really sheer seaweeds are only two two cells thick. Which is really cool This is the what used to be sister sire is now Stefano Cystis is another really common kelp on our west coast you really you find it strewn on the beach a lot and it's Really a very common seaweed out there in the subtitle kind of making an understory just like in the forest You have the big guys and then you have this understory kelp that is creating all sorts of habitat and and the the Stefanocystis Really is holding that ground there Now one of the things I've tried to do in each chapter of the book where I'm focusing on a particular Seaweeder kelp is is I'm looking really hard at the images first and that Usually gets me to ask some of the questions that drives my research And as I was looking at Stefanocystis here, and of course I've layered it onto one of these fantastic Rupric lithographs, I noticed that You know typically the kelps the kelp switcher the most differentiated seaweeds And they are the only subset of the marine algae that have the the bladders the air bladders or the pneumaticists Well, usually the pneumaticists are functioning to hold those blades up towards the surface to capture more sunlight So usually you have like the blades coming out of the pneumaticists And I looked at this heart and I was like wait a second the blades are at the bottom and These these bladder chains are kind of diminutive air bladders. They're up at the top that seemed to be a reverse situation and that kind of drove me to Asking about that and it turns out that this particular seaweed holds a Place not in the deeper Subtitle it's in the wave zone. So it is hit by those winter storm surge and our California winters That's when the big storms come in and a lot of these seaweeds take a real beating So those this top more delicate bladders get washed off That's what you find on the beach and those blades persist down at the bottom through the winter because this is a perennial so again, it was it was Kind of that that's something I actually learned when I made my very first book on beach stones I got to work with a wonderful science writer named Margaret Carruthers and As I was making the images of each stone Just questions would come up as why does it look like this and that she was able to take those questions and translated into these very wonderful Descriptions and explanations for where that stone came from so this is my evolution from that project So here is the curious world of seaweed and I hope you guys all get a chance I hope the book comes into your library So you have it there to to read through the ideas you can read each chapter And it's you kind of accrete information as you go along, but they're pretty discreet and you can dip into it as you see fit And it is organized there are 16 there was going to be 15 Chapters 15 seaweeds and then there just had to be a 16th. I couldn't leave terra gaffer out It's so it's it's one of our really important kelps on the West Coast and it tends to not get The the story because it's not a canopy forming kelp So when aerial surveys are done or research has talked about the situation of the kelps the terra gaffer tends to get left out so I had to put it in and and And this is only 16 and I want to say here that we the seaweeds you guys who've been out with Brian You know the abundance that is there and what you have here on your east coast You have to actually kind of triple for what we have on our west coast It I think there are originally 650 species named in the marine algae of California But at this point there's probably 750, you know, there's a lot more that have been named Since 1976 when that was written And I wanted to talk a little bit about why like the the abundance that we have on our west coast and Talking about our geology and and our situation might let you think about well. What is different here? What don't we have in in here in the I guess we're not the Gulf of Maine, but The waterway are we in here? Okay, there you go. Okay, so out on the coast of California in the spring time We have this phenomenon that's incredibly important for all of the marine life And that is an upwelling event that happens in the spring and that's because we have these Northwest early trade winds that come in and they push the surface waters away and they let this deeper super-nutrient-rich Deep waters well up and it also has that another factor is that our continental shelf is pretty close to our coastline So that also enhances the upwelling and that and it's cold ocean So these big kelps these robust and large organisms they need cold ocean The cold ocean holds much more nutrients and allows for this incredible growth our big kelps can grow 10-12 centimeters a day They'll grow 60 feet in a matter of months. It's an enormous amount of growth your sugar kelp grows Really really fast at least up in the northern waters where it's colder So our upwelling this is the coast of Mendocino County Where you have this rough terrain? This is I think in January and and the seaweeds They all love this rough cold water they get in the in the winter This is the full time. This is the incredible rack That the detritus that gets churned up by those winter storms throws so much of this detritus onto the shore and it's just important to always remember when we're talking about kind of the whole ecology of the kelp forest and the seaweeds that They support so many other organisms and their detritus is actually super super important for whole ecologies Not only are a lot of the invertebrates Detritus feeders like the abalone that we have out there and the urchins all just feed on stuff that's floating in the water column But once it's on shore all of the invertebrates and the flies and the insects that decompose this material this kelp material Think of what incredible bounty that is for shorebirds and think of it as you know shorebirds who are migrating south in the fall And need all that energy Super important and then all sorts of nutrients go up into the near shore ecologies So it's good to remember it has all sorts of functions besides the the habitat that it creates and the Under underwater so this is a close on this detritus and you can see all this incredible Color and kind of shape and I just love this stuff And if you find the right confluence of the geography at Cove and the current you'll find these great piles of seaweed rack So all those colors Really represent that we just saw You really can see probably the reds the greens and the browns in there I'm represent the three color groups that form the basic taxonomic groups of how we categorize our seaweeds And these were put in place by William Henry Harvey a fantastic Irishman He was actually a Quaker from Ireland. He worked out of the University of Trinity Trinity University in Dublin and in about 1840 or so. Oh, yes It was it was around Anna Atkins time in 1840 He was able to notice that the spores of the seaweeds were these these circles of super color And he created these three categories of the seaweeds that are still used today as our basic groupings from which to begin to find figure out what what it is and these are evolutionary lines of seaweed and the the the greens This is Olva and Olva is kind of a signature green seaweed It is super green and that green is made from chlorophyll and chlorophyll alone chlorophyll a and b and It is super green. You can't really miss it. It's Kelly green and it collects The chlorophyll is very good at collecting red Day red light the red wavelength of light Which is what our daylight is and we really take it for granted what our daylight is but when you're a seaweed and you're not necessarily Getting daylight might have to come up with some alternate strategies for collecting different wavelengths of light And that is what the red seaweed. Sorry the red seaweeds have done the reds here Have two accessory pigments to collect different wavelengths of light that actually penetrate the denser ocean waters Which might be green and blue wavelengths? Well, there's a red and a blue pigment that are accessory pigments in the red seaweeds that help collect those different wavelengths of light So these are strategies that we might you know not think about as land-based, you know red oriented people So that's the reds and then the browns are a much later evolutionary line And they have a brown accessory pigment that combine with chlorophyll So there is also chlorophyll in the reds, but the red then blue pigments tend to overpower them and make these red colors and these incredible colors of purple and pink The browns have a brown accessory pigment that combines with the chlorophyll to make these colors of olive and Brown and golden colors Like I said, these are evolutionary lines the green seaweeds gave rise to all of our vascular plants That's where the chlorophyll of our plant of our land-based world comes from all those green leaves And the browns are quite an older evolutionary line than the greens and the reds Which all evolved from cyanobacteria. I'll let you read that the the chapter on Evolution includes the story of Lynn Margulis. He's just one of the most kick-butt awesome scientists ever and That is the chapter on the green on Ova the greens But there's also a chapter on color and this is the image that introduces that chapter because we have a seaweed Called Masiella volans that just is this amazing purple especially once you dry it Oh, no, this isn't sorry. This isn't Masiella volans. That was my this is Masiella splendens And this is a dried specimen so I can as I said I can put these onto my scanner either dry or wet And this and I again made this image where I placed it into the cyanotype But I want to go into one story in particular and that is the story of our bull kelp Bull kelp is the dominant kelp that creates the kelp for us of our northern cow like Stretching from about central, California around the Monterey Peninsula up through now that northern, California through organ Washington British Columbia and Alaska and it ends in the middle of the Aleutians islands It is a spectacular organism these bull kelp when you find them on the beach. They're so massive When they're mature bull kelp, they're just these extraordinary Extraordinary organisms and they do all of their growing in one season. They are annuals some of them over winter From year to year, but typically their life cycle is to do this extraordinary amount of growing from early spring to late summer and then Do their reproductive work and then the entire organism gets picked up by the winter storms and and swept away and Again, so these are the dominant kelp in the they like rougher water in the colder waters of northern, California It's not that easy to dive up there and to study them our southern california kelps are much much More well-known. They're better studied. It's much easier to dive into to Work down in southern, California. I Did a whole series. I was the kelp ambassador to the Pacifica Beach coalitions Ocean heroes month or two NATO's kelp is their ocean hero and so I gave talks to lots of elementary school kids And I use the bull kelp as a way to just talk about the basic seaweed architecture Because it's so clear and you guys probably know this but all the kelps and seaweeds to survive They have to hold on to a rocky bottom and they do that with a hold fast So that's what you see here. The bull kelp's whole fast is remarkably small given how big this organism gets It has a stipe not a stem but a stipe and it has to be very hydrodynamic Because the bull kelp despite that small hold fast actually likes Rough water. It's out in in the in the surf zone. It has a very sturdy bladder Um gas filled bladder and then these beautiful blades. These are These are juveniles or teenagers But once it's mature, you'll have 60 to 70 to 80 these incredible blades that stream out along the surface of the ocean and Just are soaking in those Those rays of sunshine here. I put these two together and I didn't really realize the similarity between My scan of a couple of juvenile Nereocystis or bull kelp and Alexander Postel's version and again like like Brian was saying it's hard to get these fabulous and and Rambunctious organisms onto the confines of a page or to communicate their flamboyance On on on the confines of a herbarium sheet or Pay paper or my scanner platen and so we had a similar strategy these are some of the Juvenile or baby Nereos and Brian has some in the back in early in early spring, maybe late February Early March the the Nereocystis start to grow from these very Simple Kelp they don't even have a bladder yet, and then they develop their their bladder and a few blades and in a matter of months they are Turning into this by June or July Over your spring semester That cold ocean all of those longer days of sunshine which are a cue for all this light and this growth to start happening You can have an organism that's reaching 50 or 60 feet up towards the ocean surface And here are a couple of photographs of our kelp forest They're taken by a wonderful student at University of California at Santa Barbara a guy named Marco Mazza Who's a free diver and he takes some spectacular? Images he was very very kind to let me borrow them for a lot of these Talks and I could go on and on about the importance of the kelp forest as habitat as oxygenator as carbon sink But I'm going to focus on the seaweeds themselves, but that we have to keep that in mind that these kelp forests and and seaweed The seaweeds create an enormous amount of habitat For all sorts of organisms We have rockfish on the rest coast and I learned recently that rockfish can grow to be a hundred and fifty years old a Fish a hundred and fifty years old, but the rockfish need habitat They need safe places to be to grow that old so the rockfish popular There are lots of different species of rockfish on the west coast But they their populations are super dependent on healthy kelp forest as as are so many other organisms larval Invertebrates all need safe places to grow to maturity and the kelp forest creates that all sorts of fish who have predators need places to hide One thing just to go back here one of the things actually I found in terms of communication and Stressing the importance of the seaweeds is I've also found that that emphasizing how much oxygen These organisms produce is a way to kind of capture people's attention to like oh It's not just the trees that are making all our oxygen that we breathe and you point out that not only do the single-celled algae create You know the the the the preponderance of our atmospheric oxygen, but that the The marine algae the macro algae create a significant portion or percentage And that's makes people really think about the algae is as as a new way of thinking of how important it is So this bull kelp has to Get through its life cycle before the end of the summer before the winter storms come and they create these these spore patches Emerge in late summer and they're called sore eye And there's millions and millions of spores. I'm able to put these blades right onto my scanner And I just think they're so fabulous I can even capture this very pale line That that evolves around the edge of the sore eye or the spore patch Which where the cells are just going to part away and the whole patch will fall Right to the bottom to the ocean bottom, which will usually probably be a rocky bottom It will prop the odds are it's it's the same habitat as its parent So the odds are that it's a good habitat for these Young the spores to propagate They have an alternate life cycle Which is very tiny and microscopic and Involves egg and sperm or gametes a term I swear I would never use because I didn't understand it when I first started out But a sexual phase, but that sexual phase is so tiny and it happens down in the rocks in the middle of winter so it's in fact very Not well it is it is not well understood I have just recently come upon a group that is trying to restore kelp the the bulk help impuget sound and I've seen some of those the the egg and sperm and those gametophytes picture from a microscope, but they haven't had very good success and actually Kind of generating the full life cycle in the lab So that's a part of the bulk help that for me holds. It's allure is that we don't we don't know it fully We really don't and that's part of its majesty to me is that it's holding its its secrets Close to its chest. This is what this is from a snorkeling ex Petition a couple years ago This is late August up on the Mendocino coast and what those this is what you see in the in the late summer early fall When the bulk help is dropping its spore patches its sore eye and it really does make these holes It's almost like you've you've cut your cookies out of the dough and that edge of the dough is just hanging on there It's very stringy and and This is a picture of where I was snorkeling and took that Took this picture in 2017 and this is a picture of that cove It's Van Dam State Park And it's a place where lots of of diving Surveying kayaking lots of activity in Van Dam State Park on the Mendocino coast And this was taken in 2008 you can just see the amount of biomass there is out there I mean you could just try to estimate the weight of it I mean birds could just walk across this without any problem In 2017 this I was in the exact same place And I was in a kayak and I took this picture You can see there's a lot of space here compared to that last picture There's a very distinct edge to this bed of kelp here, and I was just up there about three weeks ago And it was no it was middle August So it should have been when there was a good amount of kelp and this is what there is now We have a huge catastrophe of our bull kelp forest kind of happening in real time up on the Mendocino coast What's really interesting to me is to go out to Van Dam State Park I was there on the most beautiful day This is what it looked like a glistening day and if you don't have those pictures that we've just seen This would feel absolutely normal Who would know and for me? I'm really interested in that. How do we make sure that normal? This doesn't become the normal we have this tendency to take what we're seeing now And unless we have some historicity and some image in our mind, and I think it's the power of imagery To say oh wait a second This this I mean I might be the new normal, but it's keeping keeping this kind of image as Part of the story of this place is something I really want to investigate in in my forecoming In my next projects So what's happening there? Why is this kelp disappearing on the left you have this beautiful? Nereo or bull kelp and on the right You have what I saw when I was out there, which is these sea urchins have actually taken this majestic bull kelp It's still attached by its hold fast to the bottom and it's actually pinned the blades of the hold fast to this vertical wall face and Urchins are just voracious kelp eaters So all over the world every you know every temperate ocean of our world's oceans or coastline Of our world's oceans has this kind of ongoing battle between urchins and kelp So there might be different kelp species. It might be different species of sea urchin But there's all we always have this, you know voracious herbivore going after this tasty herb the kelp and On the north coast of California right now. We've had this absolute Explosion of the purple sea urchin in particular and that explosion in the population has happened for a number of reasons It has and this is what we get is these urchin barrens. So there's this pretty quick Regime shift from kelp forest to urchin barren and there were a number of factors that came into play between 2013 and 2016 And they were number one. We had this warm blob come down and sit off of California And the whole West Coast and we had very warm water for a couple of years. We also had a starfish wasting disease and one of the main Predators of the urchins is a wonderful deep water large starfish called the sunflower starfish or picnopodia and that Starfish wasting disease really really wiped out starfish all starfish species all up and down our west coast From 2013 to 2016 in a particular it wiped out those what were called wolves of the sea this fast-moving Picnopodia or sunflower star other starfish has started to come back if you come to our coastline now You'll see all sorts of intertidal starfish But the picnopodia have not come back and they were holding down a niche that was vacated by the sea otter So all of our kelp and seaweeds on our west coast evolved with a top predator in the system that kept Urbivore, I mean, yeah, Urbivore's those voracious kinoderms like the the urchin and the other invertebrate the Abalone is a big kelp eater in control and there weren't maybe there were maybe 300,000 sea otter in their native range of the west coast up through the Aleutians down to northern Japan prior to about 1800 but between 1750 about an 1850 the North American fur trade the Pacific fur trade Actually completely wiped out the otter population. So that's taking out this top predator It was discovered and that's a whole fabulous story that that the otter fur was extremely valuable on the Chinese market and it was the Stellar expedition or it was the burying expedition that had Joseph Stellar on board they got shipwrecked and but they kept just a few otter pelts were stored under one of the one of the Sailors bunks because they had to throw everything overboard to get back to Russia It was ordered that everything even all of George Stellar's careful specimens that he had prepared but one sailor kept some sea otter pelts and the sea otter has no blubber So it has a very very thick fur to keep it from getting hypothermic in the cold Pacific Ocean And that's why it has such thick fur and why its pelts were so valuable Everybody rushed on board the Russians and the English the Americans the Spanish got in there And they just killed them indiscriminately and by 1911 They were pretty they were ecologically extinct on the West Coast That was a long time ago by I mean by 1850 they were ecologically extinct and Their story has cut in many places on the West Coast Their story has been left out of when we talk about seaweed because they compete with humans for things that we want There is a Urchin fishery the red urchin is actually what you the uni of your sushi So the red urchin are quite valuable and there's a lot of Fishermen who fish for red urchin the abalone is a big recreational fishery in Northern California people love to dive for abalone and when the The otter were wiped out all of those that near shore abundance grew And so that became that's part of kind of what I write about. I try to bring the otter back into the story as much as I can Trophic Cascade Top predator when it's there the urchins are in control when they're not there the urchins go out of control I'm really trying to connect the sea urchin with the the Nereocystis in particular Because I think that story has been forgotten and there is this fantastic woman named Edna Fisher and Edna Fisher when a Little raft of sea otter were rediscovered on the West Coast in 1938 There was a professor at San Francisco State University named Edna Fisher and she immediately was down on the coast of Big Sur looking at that Refugeal population of otter with her binoculars recording all of their behavior And she started writing all of the first papers about the sea otter and their behavior and she was always describing them in the bulk help in particular and alongside her papers are These wonderful drawings and paintings the otter would wrap themselves up in the kelp so they don't float away when they need to rest They also the mamas and their pups the nursery was right there in the bulk help And the mamas put their pups in a pool while they go down to dive for food. So the pups don't wash away and end up somewhere else and I Connected this with the fact that when you read the very first descriptions of bulk help by that expedition up to Alaska They the the naturalist on board the expedition Merton's Says that the Russian sailors called the bulk help sea otter cabbage because it was where they saw the sea otter playing They would literally climb onto these big tubular kelps and jump off and play and so that Association isn't really talked about when the ecologies of Northern California are discussed and so that's part of Why I'm writing these stories So this is my homage homage to that bulk help But let's go on to a few others. This is a fabulous Weak sia just gonna go through some of the other ones that that Will find in the book. It's this fabulous red the mrs. Jam weeks one of the things I've done in this book is I've given you treasures in Looking at the ID on the herbarium pressings that I've included So the mrs. Weeks comes up quite early on and you don't really know who she is until you get to the 15th chapter. I think it is which is week sia And there's a wonderful wonderful more contemporary scientist named Isabella Abbott Who followed up on the study of this particular species and kind of took it on? And she's a real mentor to many many of the phycologists that I know Today and every once in a while I meet someone who worked with Isabella Abbott So as you can see there's a theme here of women scientists Really kind of expanding our knowledge of the calp the west coast seaweeds In a really real way and these women scientists are kind of also Of course expanding our knowledge of the oceans as a whole. I mean they are they all goes together This is the post Delcia. We have some fabulous specimens collected by Brian in the back. It is this wonderfully charismatic Tree it's called C palm and it's kind of our state Kelp maybe it's actually a protected organism. You can't collect this unless you have a very special permit And it really is like this little palm tree, but it actually Exists in the most Exposed wave crashed rocks. So what you'll see the post Delcia do is that it it goes completely prostrate and then it pops back up as every wave crashes over it and I've overlaid it with one of the Ruprecht lithographs And I've also included in the post Delcia chapter the cover of one of my most precious Library acquisitions, which is the yearbook that was made by a woman named Josephine Tilden and She was the woman who started the very first marine lab to exist on the west coast and and the west coast We have tons of marine labs every university has a marine lab somewhere and they all Are doing incredible research well in 1900 the very first marine lab was established on the very wild and rugged west coast of Vancouver Island by Josephine Tilden and it was called the Minnesota seaside station because she was a professor In 1899 a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota And she would bring students from the Midwest half of them girls or women young women out on an eight-day journey by train out To the west coast of Vancouver and they would this spectacular bench With all these fabulous tide pools to study the marine algae in particular and One of the things that you find out there is incredible coral analogy now you guys know coral analogy are super fundamental to all of the The the nearshore intertidal Ecologies all over the world. They they create this really foundational this kind of base And you have both in crusting Coraline which you see here And you have articulated Coraline now the Coraline take this strategy against being eaten by those herbivores by actually Building calcium calcium carbonate in their cell walls, so they kind of act like a shell I mean in fact Linnaeus thought they were an animal and categorized them in the animal kingdom Initially, and it took about 50 years for it to get switched over into the algae and This is an incredible bottle that represents all of the crusting out Coraline algae that you find encrusting on the rocks and they're important not only to Other seaweeds, but also to larval organisms. Here's our great macro cystis. There's a chapter on this And that it is a per it is a perennial it's hold fast persists from year to year And these are its spore-filled blades So unlike the meriocystis where the the spore patches are out on the blades These are down at the base of the plant And this is what you find on the beach and what's really set me set me going Garum you guys have a garum here. Hopefully you have found some colander kelp It's so spectacular. This was it a specimen that got pulled up with an anchor Up in the Gulf in the Pnompska Bay in Maine and the story of a garum I'm gonna let you read it in the book But it's really about how these specimens like you see in the back can really transport you across place of time Because these agarum these lithographs were from the very first flora of the marine algae written in 1768 and But they were using the specimens collected by George Steller a generation earlier in the 1720s You have that right and that he had shipped across the Siberian Peninsula and then a hundred years later Postels made these incredible lithographs. So there's a wonderful story there And I just want to finish up here with mentioning the eel grasses and the and the marine grasses These are not algae. They're actually flowering plants And in California, we have not only the Zostra marina or the eel grass But we also have surf grass which exists out in the intertidal and a little bit deeper and and rougher waters There's a wonderful epiphyte Where the spores of this beautiful red algae called smithora will only land on the eel grass and the surf grass, excuse me And we get a lot of this Matting the surf grass in the springtime And there's all sorts of eel grass restoration. Of course, like the kelps. It's a fantastic carbon sink It's in fantastic oxygenator of those near shore waters. It mitigates wave action and If we have storm surges and of course it creates incredibly important habitat the herring row Love to land on the eel grass and it's this three-dimensional habitat So we'll finish here and this is just this one of these amalgams that I've mated where I'm Interweaving my contemporary scan excuse me with these historical Elements to kind of just reiterate the point that everything in these ecosystems is so Interconnected and there are layers of knowledge That is associated with the sea reeds that we don't even know yet So I'm so excited you guys are out there studying this stuff And I'm so excited to go snorkeling tomorrow and see what we find here And I think we have time for maybe some questions And thank you guys so much Any questions And I wonder if you could speak to how do you choose when you're considering your audience Yeah, you know, what do you find I'm sure for your elementary school At the algae Confidence right what's when you're kind of a rare person that you spoke into that wide range of audiences How do you choose how to tailor your use of language? Well, I try to include both and so something like nori nori is a term that's very specific to porphyra or pyropia and so I like to go back and forth so that I It took me a long time myself to learn the Latin names But if you keep at it you can learn that even me I can learn them anybody can learn them But I learned them by repetition and by Just seeing them over and over again So I actually even with the elementary school kids I throw the Latin names in there I put them up to read visually in my in an ocean garden This book is very it's a primer. It's for anybody. It's for a really wide range of readers but every Latin name is in there and The same is true with with the new book because I think just and on even my curtains I put the Latin name on there because I think the more you see it the more familiar you get with just saying egregia and then it becomes it like a friend like a Like the name of well egregia is like my buddy, you know, it is my buddy. Sorry, but it is so feather boa kelp though is very descriptive and I feel like oh, I didn't use the term tonight feather boa kelp as much But I would I probably would have in a Morse, California based Sure, because that term is used a lot bull kelp is used a lot Giant so so I'll go I'll flip back and forth But I but I do feel like the more the Latin names are out there and then for someone like me like I Don't learn birds and I don't learn trees so I can keep the algal names in my head and so Yeah Anything else Get your scanners out there guys take pictures Use your eye, you know the the seeing is so I just want to say seeing is so important and it takes you into places So tell your friends who are artists that you know, this is an incredible world The marine algae and it's got so many cool stories And I think we have books in the back and yeah So definitely take advantage of that if you want and Yes, oh absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, of course and I also so I have a newsletter it's a very sporadic newsletter from my From my studio, but when I'm doing cyanotype workshops or if I'm coming and doing a talk like this I kind of put the word out. I have scarves and shower curtains and you know post pictures from various events So if you want to get on my newsletter, there's a list in the back and thank you guys. This is really fabulous