Developing Cultivation Systems and Better Management Practices for Caribbean Tropical Seaweeds in US Waters

At the time of writing, the Caribbean’s small countries and island nations were experiencing a loss of resources resulting from climate change, nutrient pollution, ocean acidification, seagrass bed habitat loss, and overfishing and tourism revenue losses due to a global pandemic and Sargassum blooms. Sustainably managed development of a tropical seaweed industry in the region may help to assuage these issues while also providing a new seaweed biomass source for existing markets (e.g., carrageenan and agar) as well as newly emerging markets (e.g., bioplastics). Here we explore ways to support the development of the seaweed industry in tropical US waters of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico drawing on knowledge and expertise from our many partners and test sites in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Belize. In collaboration, we are prototyping seaweed farm systems and techniques that can be used in offshore areas, creating tools to automate seeding and harvesting of biomass, assessing the habitat provisioning and impacts of these farm systems and their risks from storms, identifying likely species of tropical algae with high growth and compounds of commercial interest, and conducting economic and life cycle analyses of these advanced aquaculture systems and processing. Although we describe systems optimized for the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, they can easily be adapted for use in other regions, including temperate zones, thus advancing available technology for the US seaweed industry as a whole.