The week has been spent in Denmark, on a full Sunday to Sunday course to learn more about macroalgae.
With a schedule so full you can hardly fit it to a paper, the hopes and expectations to become a real seaweed guru are high.
There are 11 PhD students partaking, all from different countries!
The course is arranged by Aarhus University, as you can see in their newsletter (sorry, only in Danish).

Our first day of the course, we went out to collect macroalgae in the field. We started at the pier next to Ebeltoft harbour, where the sun shone and it was lee on the inside where we were working. I took this years “first swim without a drysuit in Nordic waters”. It was a refreshing 16 degrees Celsius and I was in the water for about 10 minutes, collecting material. Here there were four Fucus species growing: Fucus spiralis, Fucus vesiculosus, Fucus evanescens and Fucus serratus. Jackpot!

Lots of seaweed!

After a field lunch of sandwiches, we headed north, to Grenaa. Here, the Marine Home Guard and their boat took us out on Kattegat! What a luxury! This is a new collaboration between the Home Guard and Aarhus University, so the Danish TV was out and filmed us. Click here and fast forward to 1:19 into the clip and there we are.

Monday evening and Tuesday was spent going through the collected material to determine the different species and look at their different physiological structures.
On Wednesday, we tried to reproduce sugar kelp ( Saccharina latissima ) by getting them to release spores. It didn’t quite go as planned, so we took some good old bladderwrack and got it to release eggs and sperm instead.

On Thursday, we went to Algcenter Grenaa and had a look around. Pictures from our visit you can see the Algcenter website

Anette Bruhn show us how they cultivate sugarkelp at the Algcenter

We also got to visit the Kattegat Center, located just across the parking lot. This is one of Denmark’s many fine aquariums that have long been on my wish-to-see list. It was just as good, if not better, as I had expected. There was even an exhibition of algae and their importance. It is totally worth a visit!

Friday and Saturday were devoted to compiling and analyzing all of our data, and then present it in four groups according to various themes (Taxonomy, Monitoring, Light and Cultivation).

Danish seaweed; red, brown and grøn