Scholarships can prove life-changing, not only for the funding they offer but for the opportunity to get real-world experience in your field of study. But how hard is it to win one? Imogen Morison secured a $10,000 AgriFutures Horizon scholarship and an internship with Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm through Marine Bioproducts CRC (MBCRC). She talks to Just One Drop about [...]

Lukina Lukin has already gone where few would fear to tread – taking on her late husband’s tuna farm on the wild shores of Port Lincoln. Now she’s pushing at new boundaries, trialling a seaweed fertiliser project that could reinvent finfish farming for the better. By any measure, Lukina Lukin has had a remarkable life. In 1995, aged 29, she [...]

A tide of sargassum seaweed is landing on beaches around the Gulf of Mexico, threatening livelihoods and creating a sulphurous stink. But does ‘the golden tide’ have a silver lining? “The Stinky Seaweed Blob Approaching Florida Is Absolutely Humongous” This April 4 headline from tech-news website Gizmodo is a ripper, invoking a 1950s alien attack on the sunny shores of [...]

In 2015, Jo Lane bought a seaweed ‘cottage industry’ on a whim. Now she’s charting a course to establish Australia’s first commercial kelp farm – but it’s not all plain sailing. If only life were this simple… In January 1970, Women’s Weekly magazine ran a story on ‘The Kelp Lady’, Betty Long. With her two kids, Betty combed the empty [...]

Karl Lawton is on the point of a breakthrough in the leading-edge science of microalgae bioreactors. Not bad for a bloke who only completed Year 12… “If I’m asked at a dinner party what I do, I say I’m designing and building a biofilm-based enclosed bioreactor. And that’s when the dinner party guests go, ‘Well, what the hell is that?’ [...]

James Brown, the Managing Director of Cygnet Bay Pearl Farms, grew up on country among the Bardi Jawi people of Cape Leveque. When he was a boy, he was always taught that staying tight with the mob could see you through dangerous waters. Forty years later, he’s initiating aquaculture research that draws on this very lesson As a small kid, [...]

Tasmanian-based Marinova is the world’s only organic-certified producer of high purity fucoidan, a health-giving natural extract that sells for an eye-opening A$12,000 a kilo. Perhaps even more astonishing, the product is derived from an invasive pest… The planet’s most expensive, naturally-derived substances command premium prices for a simple reason: they’re difficult to extract. White truffle costs gourmands around A$7 for [...]

Thanks to a 10% supplement of Australian seaweed, this fettucine delivers a delicious green pasta to your plate and 71% of your daily iodine requirements – which happens to be great for brain health. Dr Pia Winberg, whose lively mind is behind Venus Shell Systems and Phycohealth, says the tide is turning for seaweed: “Ten percent of seaweed in our [...]