Seaweed washes up at museum

Mystery surrounds the origin of a seaweed collection at Tūhura Otago Museum, writes On Le Lau.

In our natural science storeroom at Tūhura Otago Museum, there is a curious collection of seaweeds that have been arranged and pressed on to sheets of paper, then bound together with ribbon within a large scallop shell.

The first page reveals that these are ‘‘Specimens of Irish Sea-Weeds’’ from 1846. Multiple species of different colours and shapes have been arranged around the page and the layers of seaweeds look like a flattened garland or floral bouquet.

The date tells us that this item is older than the museum itself and firmly within the Victorian era, when collecting seaweeds, ferns and other souvenirs of the natural world was a popular activity across England and Ireland.

The next page reveals another seaweed floral arrangement, which is complemented by a poem on the opposite page:

Oh! Call us not weeds, but flowers of the sea,

For lovely, and gay, and bright-tinted are we;

Our blush is as deep as the rose of thy bowers,

Then call us not weeds, we are Ocean’s gay flowers.

Not nurs’d like the plants of the summer parterre,

Whose gales are but sighs of an evening air;

Our exquisite, fragile, and delicate forms

Are nurs’d by the Ocean, and rock’d by the storms.

How this item arrived at the museum is still a mystery and staff continue to look for any references to it in early museum catalogues and correspondence. The museum received donations of mounted seaweeds and other botanical materials in the 1890s, so it is likely that this collection was associated with one of those donations. It highlights the creativity of individual collectors, some of whom would make items to inspire an appreciation of the natural world.

Irish traditions around seaweed gathering stretch back hundreds of years, but the practice fell out of favour after people ate seaweeds to survive during the famines. More recently, there has been a revitalisation of the seaweed-cultivating industry in Ireland geared towards creating high-value food and cosmetic products, and seaweeds continue to be an important source of food and medicine for people living on coastlines around the world.

Globally, scientists have identified over 12,000 species of seaweeds, dividing them broadly into red, green and brown algal groups. More than 1000 of these can be found on New Zealand’s shores. Although many seaweeds are edible and can be good sources of iodine, vitamins, and protein, only a few species are cultivated or harvested for mass consumption, the most popular being laver seaweed species (sold as nori or karengo in New Zealand).

This collection of Irish seaweeds in a scallop shell looks very different from the museum’s other botanical specimens, which include books of New Zealand ferns, loose herbarium sheets of plants found around Otago and lichen attached to rocks.

Part of my role at the museum is to digitise these specimens by taking photographs and transcribing labels so that they are available to our community, as researchers and artists often approach the museum to look for information and inspiration.

• On Lee Lau works as collections technician natural science at Tūhura Otago Museum.