Seaweeds in mythology, folklore, poetry, and life
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Seaweeds in mythology, folklore, poetry, and life José Lucas Pérez-Lloréns 1
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Ole G. Mouritsen 2
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Prannie Rhatigan 3 & M. Lynn Cornish 4
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Alan T. Critchley 5
Received: 1 March 2020 / Revised and accepted: 8 April 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Seaweeds have been around since well before the dawn of mankind and have had varying degrees of influence on societies throughout history. Today, they have a well-established position of value after much scientific endeavour and commercialisation of applications. In the distant past, however, seaweeds were seen as a fundamental component of the sea and the beings associated with it, and they also held an essential connection to the land and the people who dwelt there. In the absence of science, myths and legends typically prevailed, and in the case of seaweed science today, many kernels of truth have now been exposed. This review traces myths and legends and some poetry which has been influenced by macroalgae over the ages, and it describes some of the early uses of seaweeds by humankind across the globe. With such a prominent role in the minds and imaginations of story tellers, artists, musicians, and poets, seaweeds command a position of respect in the evolution of ecological goods and services. While not strictly scientific, the information reviewed and laid out in this article underpins some of those uses of seaweeds that have now been established following thorough evidence-based research. Such research leads to a myriad of values of the goods and services rendered by seaweeds and their extracts, providing significant benefits to mankind, both currently, and into the future. Seaweeds were around well before the Anthropocene and are very likely to survive and contribute to global survival much longer than this current epoch. Keywords Seaweeds . Myths . Legends . Folklore . Poetry . Ethnophycology
Introduction The algae, this hodgepodge of autotrophs, ranging from unicellular microalgae to the first multicellular, macroscopic marine organisms, the macroalgae, provide the greatest portion of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. As such, the algae dominate in the production of the earth’s oxygen upon which humankind depends (Chapman 2013). Besides this primordial and indispensable service to the aerobic life forms of the Earth, seaweed (and seagrass) beds also provide a myriad of
* José Lucas Pérez-Lloréns [email protected]
ecosystem goods and services whose economic value has been estimated to be about US$ 3.8 billion per year which, compared to the US$ 4.7 billion from terrestrial forests, is not a negligible figure (Costanza et al. 1997). Since terrestrial forests occupy an area almost 25 times greater, and if we recalculate the figures per unit surface area, the value of marine vegetation (i.e. US$ 19,000 ha−1 year−1) is almost 20 times higher than that of land forests (i.e. US$ 969 ha−1 year−1) (Pérez-Lloréns et al. 2018). Among such ecological goods and services are multiple and various uses that humans have
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Instituto Universitario de
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