Of all the things symbolic of life on the coast, seaweed is among the top.
But the Smith Seaweed Ecology Lab at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla is looking to showcase its aesthetic and scientific value as well and thus is digitizing its Ellen Browning Scripps Herbarium Collection — which contains more than 5,000 seaweed pressings — and making it accessible to the public.
The collection, led by Scripps postdoctoral scholar Adi Khen and professor and marine ecologist Jennifer Smith, contains more than 300 different native and non-native seaweed species from around Southern California.
Though the collection as it stands has been developed in recent years, La Jolla’s history with seaweed pressings for art and science goes back more than 100 years.
“A lot of people are not aware of this, but people have been making seaweed pressings since the Victorian era in the 1800s,” Khen said. “When women weren’t encouraged to be scientists, they would … go beachcombing and look for treasures along the shore. When they would find seaweeds, they would lay them out on paper, delicately arranging them. They would make scrapbooks or greeting cards [with the pressings].”
Through that process, specimens could be kept in pristine condition for centuries, she said.
“There are historical specimens from the 1800s that look as if they had been collected a week ago,” Khen said. “So women would make these pressings for art, but they turned out to be valuable scientific specimens.”
Among those early scientists were philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps and her half sister Eliza Virginia Scripps, both of whom lived in La Jolla.
Ellen Scripps was one of the first people of her time to have access to a camera, so she would take pictures of where the specimens were collected and document when they were collected.
“She would get together with other female colleagues like Mary Snyder [a marine specialist who lived in La Jolla at the turn of the 20th century and was known for her collection and knowledge of algae],” Khen said. “[Snyder] would make a lot of pressings for exhibitions … so they would get together and identify the species and even document the scientific names.”
Samples of seaweed, moss and shells are displayed in a house owned by the Scripps family in La Jolla. (La Jolla Historical Society)
Though Scripps Oceanography once had a collection that included pressings by Ellen Scripps and Snyder, the curator who oversaw the collection retired in the 1990s and the pressings were sent to other museums and universities, Khen said. A few are housed at UCSD’s Geisel Library.
In 2023, Smith started teaching a marine plant biology course at UCSD that called on students to collect seaweed specimens. Since then, more than 5,000 have been collected and pressed by students, researchers and volunteers. Nearly all of the specimens have been identified by their species.
Public access to the physical collection is minimal because “we have limited capacity … so we can’t always accommodate requests for visits, but we do try,” Khen said.
To reach as many people as possible, the images are being digitized and are publicly accessible through the UC San Diego Library’s Digital Collections and the Algae Herbarium Portal. Learn more at library.ucsd.edu.
Khen said another class will be offered this winter, and about 1,000 more pressings are expected to be added to the collection.
“Once you have many pressings, thousands upon thousands spanning centuries, you can get a sense of what seaweeds were found when and where and how the seaweed communities have changed through time,” Khen said. “Maybe there is a species we are seeing less now than years ago because of climate change, or non-natives that are suddenly appearing. So it is a good way to track biodiversity.”
With evolving technology, specimen collections become even more valuable, she added.
“People have been able to sequence DNA from specimens more than 100 years old,” Khen said. “The specimens themselves also store information about the environment they were growing in and can extract chemical signatures … to get a sense of what the nutrient levels were like when the seaweeds were alive.
“They’re like a time capsule. … People seem to think they are a thing of the past or that they belong in a museum, but I think we can use them to inform the future. … It’s incredible to think of how this will serve science 100 years from now and what the seaweed communities will look like then. So it’s an honor to be contributing to that.”
Artists also have found value in the collection, drawing inspiration and information from viewing the pressings.
“People make seaweed pressings for science … but then it is also an art — how you arrange them, how it brings out the characteristics that define that species, and there is a lot of creativity that goes into that, too,” Khen said. ♦