Editor's Note 7/3/25: This report has been edited from its original version to accommodate some requested changes.

Every three years, the International Seaweed Association brings hundreds of scientists from around the world together at the International Seaweed Symposium. This year, the symposium celebrated its 25th gathering. For the occasion, the association’s executive committee decided to do something a little different.

The members of the committee chose one person from every continent to be dubbed the “Wizard of Seaweed.” Who would have known that North America’s wizard lives right in town.

Dr Charles Yarish, a resident for over 40 years, has made a living studying, cultivating, and exploring the world of seaweed. It may not seem like a glamorous job, but the seaweed industry shows great potential, even in Long Island Sound.

Yarish has been a pioneer in the seaweed industry. He has helped countries all over the world get involved in seaweed farming and the vast use of the ancient plants. Part of his work has been helping to develop “all aspects of the seaweed industry in North America,” adding to his wizardry.

Yarish introduced seaweed farming to East Africa, helped foster scientific relations between China and the United States, and had South Korea’s leading seaweed aquaculturist, Dr Jang Kim, study under him.

“He started his career with me as a master’s student, got his master’s degree with me, then did his PhD with me, and then I sent him away to Canada,” Yarish remembered of Kim. “He has links here to Connecticut! That’s where it all started for him.”

Indigenous Roots

Yarish told The Bee that his first experience with science was at Shinnecock Inlet.

“In 1969, after I came back from a summer course that changed my life at Dalhousie University, I did a seaweed survey of New York and its environs, and one of my study sites was Hampton Bay,” Yarish said.

The Shinnecock Inlet is a changing landscape thanks to the lady farmers of the Shinnecock Tribe. Most people know the Shinnecock people from the famous “Seaweed Cases” in the 1850s.

Tela Troge, director of Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, explained in a short documentary, Seaweed Stories, that settlers came and took cartloads of seaweed away from the tribe to feed livestock. Troge explained that some members of the tribe went to court and the courts recognized that not only did the seaweed belong to the Shinnecock, but the tribe’s sovereignty and right to natural resources.

Yarish was able to explain a little more about the Shinnecock tribe and where it stands with kelp farming now. He explained that a convent, Sisters of St Joseph, “wanted to give back to the Shinnecock tribe.” The sisters gave the tribe access to the water where the farmers can set up long lines to grow kelp.

The women have been receiving direction from Yarish and one of the organizations he is a part of, Green Wave, to get the kelp farms started. Yarish said they were ordinary people who wanted to do something that was related to their ancestors.

“It gives me so much pleasure when I see these gals do what they’re doing,” Yarish said. He explained that the Shinnecock farmers are trying to acquire more property because the land is the ancestral home of the tribe and overdevelopment is posing serious environmental threat to the Shinnecock Inlet.

Good On The Table, Great In The Water

Yarish took the time to thoroughly explain the science behind seaweed and its several benefits. In the documentary Seaweed Stories, a seaweed farmer from South Korea said that he eats gim every day.

Gim is the Korean name for the seaweed people eat, whether it is wrapped around a piece of sushi or packaged in a grocery store.

Yarish said that 38 million metric tons of seaweed are produced by farming, and 97% of those tons are from China, Indonesia, and South Korea.

“South Korea [has] a very large production of the most valuable of the seaweeds, which is called ‘gim.’ I say that because so often in western culture we look at gim as calling it ‘nori,’ the wrapping around sushi,” Yarish explained.

He also discussed Long Island Sound and the kelp farming there. He said that Kim’s son helped Yarish with a project in the sound where he and a few other scientists looked at biodiversity in the areas of kelp farming.

“We wanted to look at what communities of organisms are associated with seaweed aquaculture, and we use a marker called environmental DNA,” Yarish said. “I think there were 46 different species of organisms associated with our kelp farms…it provides a structure, and the fish can lay their eggs on the blades of the kelp, and we picked up the signature in the kelp farms of Long Island Sound.”

Yarish has said that the water quality of the Sound has improved quite a bit due to the kelp farming. Kelp farming is completely sustainable, and no matter how much farming of seaweed takes place, it is always a benefit to the area and the water. About 70% of the world’s oxygen comes from seaweed and oceanic phytoplankton, not land plants.

“A hot area…was plant biostimulants. Plant biostimulants are compounds that are produced by certain types of seaweeds, especially kelp, that actually stimulate the growth of our terrestrial plants,” Yarish explained. “The land plants now, have shown when they’ve been given root application, you increase the microbial community in and around the roots of land plants. The roots themselves expand in quantity, so these plant biostimulants help give land plants the opportunity to increase disease resistance, drought hardiness. These are just a few of the different things these plant biostimulants produce.”

He said that a warehouse here in Connecticut, in New Haven, is capable of processing over one million pounds of kelp to ship to the areas of the Heartland to assist with these biostimulants for the crops and farming industry.

Yarish also talked about a special strain of kelp he is currently patenting that is non-reproductive. When asked why he would want non-reproductive kelp, Yarish answered that it produces “high-yielding strains that will not interact with natural populations.” This means that this non-reproductive kelp is the highest quality and has no impact on natural populations. It does not interact with other plants and will continue to produce high quality biostimulants, hormones for cosmetics, and anything else entrepreneurs can find a way to use it.

Yarish hopes that one day kelp and other seaweed can be used as biofuel to combat the burning of fossil fuels in the Midwest and put an end to the aerial deposits of nitrogen and other pollutants in the Sound. He explained that 37% of nitrogen in the Sound is aerial deposition, which is hard to combat.

One of his colleagues in California, Julia Marsh, extracts the gel-like properties of seaweeds and uses it to create a thin, yet strong, bioplastic.

“What Julia has done, very nicely, is producing a very thin plastic that she can mold into nice packaging…She’s trying to get sustainable sources of these compounds that she needs to produce the packaging…The whole idea is, when you deal with farm seaweeds and being able to extract different types of compounds from them, that’s renewable and sustainable, and it supports that area called circular ecology and you’re not impacting the environment in a negative way,” Yarish said of Marsh.

‘It All Depends On Entrepreneurs’

Yarish hopes to see more kelp farming not only in Long Island Sound, but throughout the country and the world. He said that the farming is only one part of the issue, the other side of it is figuring out new and innovative ways to use the plants.

“It all depends on entrepreneurs…There were a few other entrepreneurs now who have leases for seaweed farms, principally kelp farms, and it takes a while for people to say, ‘I wanna do this.’ Getting people who may have been displaced, fishermen, for one reason or another,” Yarish said.

He talked about the lobster die off in 1998 and how the warming temperatures caused it. He said he had sympathy for the lobstermen because they had jobs, livelihoods, and careers on the line. Due to kelp farming, these displaced workers were not completely at a loss, though.

Yarish said, “They have this alternate source of income coming from the products that they can produce from that seaweed biomass, but they have to understand business.”

He thought back to two men who invited him up to Portland, Maine, for dinner to see the product they were making. It was kelp pasta.

“I still remember that dinner. It was a beautiful dinner topped with fresh lobsters, other seafood, and the pasta that they had was kelp pasta. And it was made from kelp…it was from wild harvested material, and I said, ‘Okay, I see your product,’ and that was the development of this company called Ocean Approved,” Yarish said.

The two men in charge were Paul Dobbins and Tollef Olson. The company is now known as Atlantic Sea Farms, and it is the largest producer of farmed seaweeds in North America.

“That was really the expansion of the kelp industry up in the Gulf of Maine.”

With the two men from Atlantic Sea Farms, Yarish developed a kelp manual that is open source. Yarish said that keeping most of his findings open source is “really important” to him.

He thought the largest impediment to developing a seaweed industry in North America was a lack of information for the general public. He said the information was not getting out to entrepreneurs or investors, and by making it open source, people like the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, Dobbins and Olson, and Marsh were able to get into the game.

Yarish said, “This has been important to get more people involved. And being open source, not having to have it behind any firewalls, and making open source and manuals that look like cookbooks…paved the way for increasing production, not only here in the US and Canada, but also my open source manuals that are available through the UCONN libraries and the Connecticut Sea Grant program have had almost, I think, 10 or 15,000 downloads. They’ve also been…[in] 90 or 100 countries around the world…and that’s been the value of open source.”

He added, “The American taxpayer provided the funds to these federal agencies that I got grants from, why don’t we give something back? And that was a driving force.”

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.