Seaweed Savior

In March, Black Cat Weekly published my story The Oathbreaker. A professor is swept up in the saga of a woman doomed to spend eternity with her Viking captor. He is studying seaweed on the coast of Anglesey, Wales, when three women recruit him to save her. 

Black Cat Weekly cover

Today, the BBC published an article about a real professor who studied seaweed on the coast of Anglesey, and who is credited with saving the Japanese sushi industry. Laver is a type of seaweed that grows in green-black sheets on rocks and is used in British cooking, particularly as Welsh Laverbread.  When Kathleen Drew-Baker attempted to cultivate Laver in her laboratory, she found that seashells in the bottom of the tank developed a reddish growth. She recognized the red growth as a species of algae called Conchocelis rosea. Studying it further, she realized that C. rosea wasn't a separate species at all. Laver has two different lifestyle stages, one as a red filament growing on seashells and one as blackish sheets growing on rocks. She published her findings in the October 1949 edition of the journal Nature.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a series of storms had decimated the production of Nori, the seaweed used extensively in Japanese cuisine, especially in sushi. Sea mines and general devastation of World War Two further reduced the supply. A Japanese professor read Drew-Baker's paper and realized that the closely related Nori could be cultivated the same way. Now, the conchocelis-phase Nori is grown on oyster shells in nurseries. Nets are placed over the shells until the adult phase of Nori attaches to them, and then the nets are taken out to sea, where it grows the thin leaves that can be harvested and processed for food.  Drew-Baker's discovery was the key to the recovery of the seaweed beds.

Seaweed growing on nets from the Nori Cultivation page

Kathleen Drew-Baker's story has another angle. Although she was an academic all her life, she was unpaid for most of it. Back then, the university would not employ married women. When she married she was offered the opportunity to continue working, but she was not on the payroll.

If my three angry women had met Kathleen when she came to Anglesey, they would have had a lot to discuss about the very slow pace of improvement in women's rights.