© JF Aldon
The farming of seaweeds is a widespread practice throughout the Philippines, with an estimated 200,000 households reliant on the industry across the country.
Elkhorn moss (Kappaphycus alvarezii) is a popular species for cultivation, serving as a source of carrageenan for food products, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. However, farmers of elkhorn moss in the Philippines often struggle with poor-quality seedlings, leading to slow growth, low yields, and susceptibility to ice-ice disease, which can devastate seaweed productivity.
Seeking to address this, researchers at the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Centre, Aquaculture Department (SEAFDEC/AQD)
are advocating for the industry to adopt tissue culture technology to produce seaweed seedlings that are disease-free and genetically robust. Led by Joseph Faisan Jr., the researchers recently proved that their lab-grown tissue-cultured seedlings can significantly outperform the cuttings that farmers derive from their previous crops.
Compared to farm-sourced seedlings, tissue-cultured seedlings showed growth rates up to 6.5 times faster during three 60-day culture runs. The researchers also found that tissue-cultured seaweeds had lower cases, or a delayed onset of ice-ice disease and harmful epiphytic filamentous algae.
“Our results support the hypothesis that seaweeds are reinvigorated through tissue culture and the process could enhance their growth performance,” commented Faisan, in a press release.
In addition to improved growth rates and disease resistance, the use of lab-cultured seedlings would provide a safety-net for farmers in the instance that their crops are destroyed by extreme weather events. Currently, if a farm is washed-out by a typhoon, farmers may struggle to replant without the cuttings of their previous crop.
“What we need to achieve now is the economies of scale in producing tissue-cultured seedlings so we can mass produce and provide the seedlings to farmers at an affordable cost,” concluded Dan Baliao, SEAFDEC/AQD.
