You may have seen seaweed covering rocky shorelines along the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines of Canada. But did you know they are also found in the Arctic, surviving long dark winters beneath thick sea ice? In fact, the Canadian Arctic is home to massive kelp forests, an incredibly productive and important coastal habitat. Kelp are large brown seaweeds that play an important role in the marine environment, providing habitat and food for fish and benthic (bottom-dwelling) invertebrates.
This summer, a team of researchers from the museum, with colleagues from Laval University, flew to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, in the Western Canadian Arctic. Their goal was to study seaweed biodiversity and kelp forest ecology. If you’re wondering, “What are seaweeds, anyway?”, click here to learn more! We had big plans – to complete a biodiversity survey of the area, to assess biomass using quadrats (small survey plots) and to set up experiments to study the influence of kelp forests on fish and benthic invertebrates.
But first we had one small problem—finding the seaweed! We knew there was some around, and local knowledge and previous surveys by a museum phycologist (a scientist who studies algae) in the 1960s were able to give us some clues. We knew that the areas with seaweed were patchy and not well defined, as the shorelines around Cambridge Bay tend towards cobble and sand, typically not an ideal substrate for growing kelp.
With a huge amount of ocean to search, we were delighted when, on day six of our trip, we found our first kelp patch in the Findlayson Islands, thanks to our local guide John Lyall Jr.! After that day, we were on a roll, discovering new kelp beds almost every time we went out. We were also treated to a dizzying array of undersea life, from sun stars to pteropods to soft coral amongst the seaweed.
On almost our last day, we had our most exciting dive yet—an Arctic kelp forest! We finally found a spot with kelp dense and abundant enough to make up a real undersea forest. We had to head home shortly after finding this beautiful site, but we plan to visit year after year and study the changes that occur as the Arctic Ocean warms due to global climate change.
Thank you very much to the community of Cambridge Bay for the warm welcome, to John Lyall Jr. for sharing your expertise, and to Polar Knowledge Canada for supporting our research.
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Amanda M. Savoie
Amanda studies the species diversity, biogeography and taxonomy of marine macroalgae in Canada.
