Sustainable Seaweed Harvesting
Find out about how we sustainably hand cut our seaweed…
Using just a pair of scissors and a couple of buckets our seaweed is sustainably harvested by hand from pristine wild shores of our island home.
There is obviously a little more to it than that but before we could begin harvesting the seaweed, the right beaches had to be selected depending on what species we were after. Once the locations were chosen we had to be granted a licence from Crown Estate Scotland, proving to them and Scottish Natural Heritage that the method we had in place is robust enough to be used for sustainable seaweed harvesting.
It is easy to think of seaweed as a plant but it is in fact a type of macro algae, instead of a root system like plants, seaweed has a “holdfast” (Figure 2.) that keeps the seaweed attached to a substrate but doesn't pick up nutrients like the root system of a plant would. When harvesting the stipe (Figure 2.) is cut as far up the organism as possible to maximise regrowth and to maintain good species cover. If you can notice where we have been harvesting we're doing our job wrong.
Figure 1. Whole organism - Fucus vesiculosus
Seaweed can have air bladders (Figure 3.) like Fucus vesiculosus (Bladderwrack) to help them reach for the surface and light since like plants seaweed gains energy through photosynthesis, seaweed is also fantastic at it since they are at a disadvantage to land based plants being underwater. In fact seaweed is incredibly important for numerous reasons to our marine ecosystems but one of the most important reasons is that seaweed removes carbon dioxide from the oceans through photosynthesis off-setting ocean acidification.
Since our business revolves around there being a healthy shore with lots of wonderful seaweed and sea creatures it is in our best interest to make sure the ecosystem is in good condition so we can continue to provide natural skincare using sustainably harvested seaweed.
Figure 2. Airbladders and fronds - Fucus vesiculosus
Figure 2. Holdfast and Stipe - Fucus vesiculosus
Here at Skye Seaweed we have an absolute passion for the sea and everything that lives in and around it, so please feel free to get in touch on social media @Skyeseaweed and by using the form on the contact page if you have any questions about Seaweed or the Isle of Skye.