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What about isolation from the global oceans? If something goes wrong with mass scale seaweed farming how bad things can become?I don't know, producing toxins,

What about isolation from the global oceans? If something goes wrong with mass scale seaweed farming how bad things can become?I don't know, producing toxins, being invasive and spreading spores to all the oceans, being affected by virus and spreading those virus, depleting oxygen/sunlight in some big areas or dying by some disease and becoming source of methane, to name a few from my point of not knowing about the topic. The impact of something going wrong on land usually doesn't spread very far, but what about all interconnected seawater? Ice-9 made me afraid of that kind of things.

kuhewa 4y ago
Precautionary approach is a good idea but as far as risk across the range of proposed ocean industries, this one is kinda meh. the extent of most tail risk in the realm of possibility has already happened and we've learned from the cautionary tales. e.g. invasive algae species have already been spread around the world, many of which for attempts at cultivation. farm planning/ disease propagules we've learned quite a bit about because of salmon farming. Etc. What is fucked regarding seaweed massive dieoffs due to climate change and tropicalisation of temperate ecosystems, disappearance of kelp forests, for example along thousands of km of southeastern Australian coastline.
pjc50 4y ago
Ice-9 isn't real. The damage from industrial salmon farming is a far better example.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  It's not. Really large seaweed monocultures already exist, naturally. It's the nature of plants floating in an ocean: they reproduce/grow asexually as a big blob. In so far as they don't stay monocultures, because other plants and animals migrate into them: industrial scale monocultures can't actually keep that from happening. Monocultures in plants are something entirely different from pooping, pissing fish that shed tons of parasites and get showered in food and antiparasitics. We'll have to see what the problems will actually be.

kuhewa 4y ago

Precautionary approach is a good idea but as far as risk across the range of proposed ocean industries, this one is kinda meh. the extent of most tail risk in the realm of possibility has already happened and we've learned from the cautionary tales. e.g. invasive algae species have already been spread around the world, many of which for attempts at cultivation. farm planning/ disease propagules we've learned quite a bit about because of salmon farming. Etc. What is fucked regarding seaweed massive dieoffs due to climate change and tropicalisation of temperate ecosystems, disappearance of kelp forests, for example along thousands of km of southeastern Australian coastline.

pjc50 4y ago

Ice-9 isn't real. The damage from industrial salmon farming is a far better example.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
It's not. Really large seaweed monocultures already exist, naturally. It's the nature of plants floating in an ocean: they reproduce/grow asexually as a big blob. In so far as they don't stay monocultures, because other plants and animals migrate into them: industrial scale monocultures can't actually keep that from happening. Monocultures in plants are something entirely different from pooping, pissing fish that shed tons of parasites and get showered in food and antiparasitics. We'll have to see what the problems will actually be.