Julia Baum

No, it was not delicious.

It was my colleague, intertidal ecologist Chris Harley at UBC was the one out there observing all of that and documenting it and taking photos and doing the estimates.

And he talks really vividly about the stench of all that dying stuff.

Meat, basically, you know, I think we eat mussels, but imagine it all.

Imagine leaving a billion mussels out on the coastline baking and rotting in the sun.

It was a pretty overwhelming smell from what I gather.

Not delicious.

Sure, sure.

It is super weird, right?

In the case of sea lettuce, which is really, you know, most people have probably not heard of sea lettuce.

It's definitely not.

It's kind of a, it's like a green wet mop.

along our coastline here, right?

It's like really spongy and absorbent.

And anyone who goes for a walk along the beach on the west coast of British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest will have seen this.

It's like a very bright green, spongy, wet mop type thing.

But the reason that it did well is not so much that it loved being baked in the sun, but what happened is

All the other members of its community, so all the other seaweeds, which are brown seaweeds and red seaweeds and kelp, which are the type of seaweed that we really like, they all, kind of the same as the mussels, they just baked.

They completely bleached, dried out, baked, dyed.

And then there was open real estate.