Seaweed Foraging on the Oregon Coast
With the start of the seaweed foraging season just around the corner, I figured it was time to share a little about best practices and seaweed harvesting regulations in Oregon!
Learn about the regulations behind seaweed foraging, best practices, and how I like to go about collecting seaweeds for the year.
Here’s a little nit and gritty on seaweed harvesting in Oregon, before I get into my personal practices.
Most people may not realize that there is even a seaweed foraging season along the Oregon Coast, but there is! Harvesting of live seaweeds is actually not something you can do year round. It’s a bit confusing, if you know that most shellfish foraging is open year round. The season of live seaweed harvesting (meaning seaweed still attached to a substrate) runs from March 1st to June 15th, and is regulated by the Department of State Lands rather than Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, like shellfish harvesting and all other fishing. There is no license required to harvest seaweeds along the coast, but there is a limit set at one-gallon volume container per day and up to three gallons per calendar year.
When harvesting live seaweeds, in Oregon or anywhere, there are a number of things to keep in mind.
As part of the regulations, people are only allowed to harvest by hand, using a knife or similar instrument. Tearing or using instruments like rakes or forks is prohibited. The disturbance or removal of holdfasts (or the root-like structure that attaches seaweeds to their substrate, pictured below) is not allowed. To stay within sustainable harvest practices and within legal regulations, harvesters should always cut seaweeds a few inches (or feet in the case of some kelps) above the holdfast. The holdfast allows for regrowth of the algae, so leaving it in tact is crucial for the persistence of seaweed.
The holdfast (or root-like structure) of a kelp. Harvesters are required to keep these in tact and never remove or disturb.
There are a few species that are completely off limits. Sea Palm (Postelsia sp.), eel grass (Zostera spp.) and surf grass (Phyllospadix spp.) may not be cut or disturbed in any area. As well as any species on the “Rare, Threatened and Endangered Species of Oregon” list. Eelgrass and surf grass are two species protected as essential fish habitat, while sea palm is a species that has previously been harvested to extremely low populations. It is also hugely important to know growth properties of seaweeds to know when and where harvesting can be done sustainably.
As well as species, there are also some areas that are completely off limits. There is no disturbance or removal of living or non-living plants in marine reserves, marine protected areas, marine gardens, intertidal research reserves, and wildlife or habitat refuges. In snowy plover management areas, there is no salvaging or removal of marine plants during seasonal closures (between March 15 and September 15th). Definitely do your research before you get to a specific location!
Please refer to Oregon’s General Ocean Shore State Recreation Area Rules for more information!
Salvaging non-living seaweeds can happen all year (except for in the snowy plover management areas as mentioned above). Salvaging refers to the removal of seaweeds washed ashore. Of course if you are intending to eat the seaweed you salvage off the beach, you do want it to be pretty fresh, and you need to know how to identify whether it is actually fresh or not. This becomes more self explanatory the more time you spend looking at seaweeds washed up on the beach. Essentially, if it looks and smells like it is deteriorating, it likely is, and therefore is not something I would eat. No seafood should smell like seafood, and if it has a strong odor to it, it is not fresh. If it looks as if it could have just come out of the ocean, is not covered in flies, and is not super duper slimy or squishy, it’s probably pretty fresh!
There are some species that I only ever harvest by salvaging.
For instance, Kombu (Lamanaria setchelli) is considered an old growth kelp, that can live about 25 years. For this reason I do not ever cut it off rocks where it is growing and constantly look for it washing ashore with big storms. Bull Kelp is another one that due to its growing location and threats from changes in the environment, I tend to only salvage off the beach.
I’ll normally rinse any salvaged seaweed off in the ocean to remove sand before taking it home (always be careful of ocean conditions and sneaker waves!).
Because the seaweed harvesting season is pretty limited in Oregon, I use the few harvestable months to collect my three gallon bag limit and process (dry, pickle, freeze) to have them for the remaining seasons.
One thing to consider is that many seaweeds are annuals, and require sunny conditions to begin their growth in a year, so when the season opens in March, not all seaweeds are in their highest production. I’d say May and June are the most productive seaweed harvesting months on the Oregon Coast.
Best practices of foraging seaweed are similar to all other foraged goods, please do not ever clear an area of a particular seaweed. If there’s only a little bit present, please leave it to allow it to continue growing throughout the year. If you go to an area in March and the growth appears very limited, rather than harvesting a tiny bit from every individual you see, leave it and come back in a few months when you can harvest more while potentially disturbing less.
Identification of seaweeds and kelps can be a little tricky to start, just like mushrooms. The good news is that, unlike mushrooms, almost all seaweeds are edible, and as far as I know (but please don’t take my word for it) none are going to kill you. Edible does not mean palatable though, and while you could theoretically eat most to all of seaweeds on our coast, some are super metallic, or plastic-y, or slimy, and may not be something you WANT to eat. There’s a handful of sought after edible species on our coast, and once you start seeing them they become pretty easy to identify. I won’t get into identification here but save it for another post (or maybe a guide book)!
I hope this is a helpful introductory guide to seaweed foraging on the Oregon Coast. Beginning in May I will be leading seaweed foraging workshops along with shellfish foraging workshops throughout the season. I cannot wait to get back out into the intertidal ecosystems, and share the abundance and diversity with others.
Happy Foraging! I’ll be updating class offerings starting in April 2024 - stay tuned for some seaweed days.
