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Web ChangesUpdated 6th November 2007 Spring Newsletter - Please Follow this link to read the Spring Newsletter. Archived Newsletters Recent News The Ministry of Fisheries have produced the first step in creating a Fisheries Plan for Seaweed management, this is an information brief of the current situation of seaweeds and the industry. The Ministry is creating some 19 Fisheries plans. The next step for the Seaweed Fisheries Plan is to consult stakeholders and Iwi, this process will take time and is not due to begin until 2009 at the earliest. You can download the Seaweed information brief documents by following this link. www.fish.govt.nz You will see that the information contains many gaps in knowledge, there is ample opportunity and need for further research into New Zealand seaweeds. Now is the time to get together and discuss the management of an economically sound and sustainable seaweed industry, one that is world class and will provide jobs and income for generations to come. Article on two rare seaweeds discovered in Northland "Rare seaweeds discovered in Northland" Two rare New Zealand seaweeds have been discovered in Northland, and they could have exciting commercial applications for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. NIWA scientist and seaweed expert Wendy Nelson said one of the red seaweed species, Gelidium longipes, had not been collected for 50 years, and another, Gelidium allanii, had been recorded only from a single site since it was first discovered in 1942. ‘Both species are very distinctive and can be easily distinguished from other New Zealand species. However, they’re small, so it would be easy for the untrained eye to overlook them,’ said Dr Nelson in the latest issue of Aquatic Biodiversity & Biosecurity, released today.‘Although the naturally occurring populations of the species we’ve found so far couldn’t sustain harvesting, they may contain commercially useful variants of agar that could be the basis for the cultivation of unique new products. ‘Many of these species are found only in very small numbers and have highly restricted distributions. This makes the populations extremely vulnerable to coastal modifications or developments. We use molecular sequence analysis to allow us to work with very small samples and ensure that we don’t over-collect or damage small populations’. ‘We need to live sustainably with our coasts and marine resources. However, there’s still so much we don’t know about the distribution and properties of species around our coastline, and we can only protect what we know is there.’
Press ReleasesThese are the press releases we've issued over the last year. You may want to search for topics by keyword.
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