Asparagopsis & the anthropocene - HoldFast part 2

Antoine, you are in Norway.

I'd love if you could share a little bit about the project that you're working o- on over there.

Is it GeCo Kelp or Gecko Kelp? [laughs] I'm assuming-

[laughs]

...

GeCo Kelp, but I wanted to check.

[laughs]

We-- I mean, I always say GeCo Kelp, but-

GeCo Kelp.

I like that

... at least, uh, it's, I mean, yeah, it's, it's all about from gene to ecosystem, rose and connections in, uh, in kelp forest here in Norway.

So yeah, it's been, it's been a four-year project in, in, in the work, and, uh, we've just been coming here every year doing lots of field work and, uh, trying to create a baseline for a species that's actually not really well-studied, uh, called Laminaria hyperborea.

So it creates, uh...

It's a species that creates those underwater kelp forests, um, that really stand upright and, uh, host for a lot of species as per usual, but it also has lots of epiphytes along its type.

And when you really dive in it, you really have this forest sensation, which we don't quite have with Ecklonia radiata, I must say.

Yeah, so we've been really creating this baseline.

But the, the coast of Norway is, is heavily affected, not so much by climate change, but by indirect effects of humans really breaking the food network.

So we have, uh, [inhales] explosions that just have urchins that are overgrazing and creating urchin barrens.

But in lots of parts of Norway they-- we still have those very lush, uh, kelp forest.

Again, we've, we see this very gold-looking color on a good day, [laughs] when we have a good viz.

So this project really look at a lot of the, the productivity aspects, so how much biomass is produced, how much carbon is being transferred, but we also have been sequencing kelps all along the coastline to better understand genetic structure, connectivity, and diversity, and we're using this to then predict the adaptive potential of those kelp forest.

And Norway, in a similar ways to Australia, is a very good sort of in situ laboratory 'cause it's an extensive longitudinal gradient, so we go from very cold to relatively warm.

Um, so it allows us to test for a lot of mechanism around, um, local adaptation.

And right now we're running a really large scale experiments where we have kelps in tanks at different temperatures from different areas, all the way from, from Tromsø up north to Arendal, where I'm working at the moment.

And, uh, yeah, we've been, um, documenting the photosynthetic efficiency of those kelp forest under different temperatures and just the overall growth patterns to try to better predict how climate change is gonna shape those kelp forest.