As Many Will Know,

it was my birthday on April 14th,

 and I have just today found out that I share that date with a lady that saved the the Japanese seaweed industry although sh had never traveled to Japan! every April 14th in Japan, Kathleen Drew-Baker has become known as the ‘Mother of the Sea‘, and each year on 14th April there is a celebration of her work,it is a fascinating story, briefly the Japanese began cultivating nori in the 1600s, due to a change in the farming methods, and after a series of typhoons in 1948, the seaweed beds were  decimated and since next to nothing was known about the life cycle of seaweeds, no one knew how to grow new replacement plants, the nori industry crashed, seaweed farming had always been a risky business due to its unpredictable nature so much that the seaweed was nicknamed ‘gambler’s grass’, but on the other side of the world help was at hand,

Drew-Baker discovered a special phase of the life circle of the Porphyra umbilicalis a North Wales and East Ireland coastline seaweed better known as laver and a nori relative, laver was traditionally mashed into a paste, rolled in oatmeal, and fried to make laver bread, biologically, the seaweed behind this breakfast munchie is startlingly weird, Drew-Baker discovered that a tiny, wormlike alga was actually also a form of laver, the large edible blades are male and female sex organs of which results it’s a minuscule offspring, known as a conchocelis, that bores into a seashell, where it develops into a filamentous crust capable of producing spores that develop into more laver blades, the solution to the nori farmers’ problem was then oyster shells, which proved to be reliable and still is the basis of the nori industry today,

the above artwork by Owen Davey, created for the University of Manchester University,

and in Uto, Kumoto, a monument to her, to read more about this fascinating lady, and how she was fired, for getting married, grab a coffee and have a look here.