27” x 62” fine art print on Hahnemuhle rag paper. Edition of 10.

Saccharina latissima or sugar kelp. This sugar kelp specimen was collected from the waters of Penobscot Bay in the Gulf of Maine. It actually has a juvenile kelp overlaid along its middle. While most kelps are native to a specific edge of a specific ocean, sugar kelp is found throughout the world’s oceans. It grows fast and abundantly creating significant biomass from the simple availability of sunlight and ocean nutrients, so it is a favorite species for the exploding enterprise of kelp farming, from Alaska to Maine. The microscopic sexual phase of its life cycle is controlled in a lab so that spores are produced to settle on a twine that is wound around a larger rope that, once strung between buoys in the ocean will host the holdfast while the blades grow rapidly out from the rope, through wintertime.