End of the Month
You have just set up your aerated seaweed cultivation system, and it was expensive! The seaweeds have to grow before you can make a profit, so you need to go hunting for coins to afford this month's bill. Watch out for thieves!
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Seaweed cultivation is a promising field with a lot of potential but best practices still have to be developed and evaluated. In this project, we worked with Ulva spp. cultivation. Ulva is a genus of green macroalgae that is relatively easy to cultivate and can be combined with fish farming to absorb excess nutrients and prevent phytoplankton blooms. In order for it to be incorporated into farms, existing or new, cultivation methods have to be evaluated. Setting up a seaweed system might be expensive both in terms of money and time, and as such, you would want an estimate of your expected yield beforehand.
In this experiment, we tested the effect of aeration on Ulva growth in earthen ponds. The aerated treatment had a continuous flow of air from the bottom of the cage which allowed the seaweed to circulate. This setup is more expensive in both deployment and maintenance compared to the non-aerated system, which only requires the initial cage assembly. However, we did find that there was a significant difference between the two options; the aerated systems had a much higher yield than the non-aerated, and also produced seaweed with fewer epibionts.
Hopefully, this study will help inform future seaweed cultivation methods and make it easier for fish- and seaweed farmers to estimate their future yield.
Collection of seaweed for stocking cages
Experimental setup in earthen pond
Cage prototype design
Biomass collection as part of weekly monitoring
Aerated vs non-aerated cultivation cages
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