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“We'll harvest some fertile patches off some adult plants, which is just a shaded area on the frond of the seaweed.”

For swimmers and fishermen, seaweed can be a nuisance, but for farmers it’s an organic fertilizer, and to pharmaceutical companies, a source of useful compounds. Well now, scientists in Ireland are working on ways to harvest kelp a kind of seaweed found in coastal areas around the world. There are millions of tons of kelp on the coasts of Ireland alone. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside.

“I have some adult plants that are fertile adult plants, collected from the beach. I am going to bring these back to the lab where I will clean them and try and get them to release their spores. And then I will try and culture the spores and get them to grow into adult plants.”

Declan Hanniffy studies at the Irish Seaweed Center at the University of Galway. He’s developing a novel way of cultivating kelp.

“At the moment I am trying to release spores which are the seeds of the plant and cultivate them through the first few weeks and months of their life cycle and seed them onto twine. After a few weeks they will grow to one or two centimeters in size where the twine will be taken then and wrapped around a thicker rope which is called a long line, and this will be placed at sea and the plants will grow quicker there. To harvest them then, we just get a boat and pull in the rope and just remove the adult plants from the rope.”

Over the next months, Declan Hannify will be setting out his seeded ropes in the ocean.

You can follow his progress on our website, pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation.