Amanda Savoie: seaweed and kelp forests

Marine biologist Amanda Savoie, of the Canadian Museum of Nature, discusses her research on seaweed and kelp forests in the waters around Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

• Transcript

  My name is Amanda Savoie. I'm a research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature and also director of the Museum’s Center for Arctic Knowledge and Exploration.

  I'm here in Cambridge, studying seaweed and really interested in a few different questions. We're interested to know where seaweed can be found in the ocean around Cambridge Bay, what species are found here, how abundant they are, and whether or not there is any special habitat called kelp forests where you have large patches of kelp that kind of create a micro habitat and protection for fish and other fauna like invertebrates.

  We're sort of really in a preliminary stage of starting to understand what seaweed lives there and where can they be found. The fun part with this research is that we're doing it with using scuba diving. We go out on a boat, we find a dive site using sometimes drop cameras or sometimes the water is so clear that we can look down into the bottom of the ocean basically, and see if there's a down there or not.

  Then we gear up and we jump in the water and we're scuba diving and collecting and also photographing and mapping where we find things. We collect samples using mesh bags. We bring them back to the lab so we can study them. We have to wear a lot of thermal protection because the water here is very cold, sometimes zero degrees.

  So far we've learned there is sea weed right around Cambridge Bay. This area was kind of a big unknown for kelp researchers, whether there was seaweed here or not. There's kelp, there's big patches of kelp. We're really just beginning to understand where they're found, why are they in some areas? It's probably partly related to ice, so where there's less ice in the winter, we're seeing more kelp and it's really interesting so far.

  You need your primary producers, which means they make their energy from the light of the sun and they are part of the base of the marine food chain. They're a really important part of coastal ecosystems, and they also create habitat in the subtidal. They create a place for fish and invertebrates, live and sort of have protection from the elements and from predators.

  CHARS has been absolutely instrumental to our success so far. They have amazing facilities, with scuba tanks, air compressors, all kinds of equipment and lab space that we can use that really makes a much easier and more productive. I can press seaweed in the lab, there's the microscope and of course all this scuba equipment is really helpful.