From mourning corals to fighting cow burps

It is a stunning late summer day on the mid-coast of Maine, and outside Dr. Nichole Price’s office, the Atlantic shimmers white gold in the noontime light.

Price is recounting her 20-plus-year journey as a marine biologist, one that has taken her from California to the South Pacific, and now back home to her native New England. She has spent many years watching in slow motion the devastating effects of our warming planet on one of nature’s most spectacular creations: coral reefs.

But recently, her career has led her to a potentially game-changing solution to one of the world’s biggest climate problems, and an opportunity to prevent significant amounts of dangerous heat-trapping pollutants from entering our atmosphere. “I’ve taken a very unexpected turn into cows,” says Price. She laughs at the unlikeliness of it all, but it’s no joke. “This really is exciting stuff,” she says. And she’s deadly serious.

The sad outlook for corals

Now in her mid-forties and a mother to two daughters, Price is a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory of Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine. Her study of corals has focused on how certain types of encrusting seaweeds affect the health of reef systems. She often wore dive gear to work and needed a passport and sunscreen when traveling to do field research.

In the early 2000s, the harsh impacts of ocean acidification (the decrease of oceanic pH levels driven by excessive carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere) on organisms that grow a hard outer shell in order to survive, were just beginning to be understood. With graduate work done at the University of California at Santa Barbara and then her post-doc work at the Scripps Institute in San Diego, Price had labs on the French Polynesian island of Mo’orea and the Palmyra Atoll in the Northern Line Islands.

It was exotic and important work – but depressing. “Back then, the science was still very much focused on getting a better understanding of how these dynamic reef ecologies work and how that might change in the years ahead. But, by the time I got to Scripps, we were getting good views of the winners and losers in a more acidic ocean. And it wasn’t good news for corals… It became clear that no matter what type of coral research you were doing – no matter how remote your lab – you would eventually see the coral die. It just didn’t matter. Most reefs where I did field research are all but dead now.”

The juxtaposition between her young, growing family and the doom and gloom of her work became too much for Price. Her research increasingly felt like a dead end, with reefs dying everywhere she looked, thanks to a variety of climate-driven circumstances; sea level rise, bleaching events, acidification and invasive seaweeds. “It felt like we were screaming into the void,” recalls Price. “That was the hardest part: making these discoveries and ringing the alarm about these very big problems but no one was listening. It got really hard to be hopeful.”

It was right around then, however, that Price had a life-changing ‘aha’ moment. She was at a conference in Japan listening to yet another presentation about the death of baby corals when something outside caught her eye. It was seaweed farmers working the near shore waters of Okinawa. Her mind began to wander as she watched them and soon found herself daydreaming about seaweed as a solution. She had experience with encrusting seaweeds and how they worked as agents of good in the development of coral reefs. She also knew that certain seaweeds and kelp could take CO₂ out of sea water with impressive efficiency, effectively cleaning up a primary pollutant. “It’s not like I had some vision of my future, but there was a spark of something. A curiosity. A vague idea about what might be possible. It’s funny that I remember it so well, but it was that profound to me. It just sort of stuck,” says Price.

Corals, cows and methane

As fate would have it, Price soon found herself thinking about a return to her New England roots, due to her father’s failing health. She took an interview at the Bigelow Laboratory in Maine, a state that became home to the U.S.’s first commercial seaweed fishery some fifty plus years ago. She was offered a job and accepted it. She decided that she was done with researching the decline of things and ringing alarms about climate collapse. Instead she wanted to research resilience, and actual solutions.

She and her colleagues began by pulling on threads from Price’s graduate research when she observed certain encrusting seaweeds absorbing impressively large amounts of carbon from the water. They began investigating the utility of farming seaweed in the near-shore waters of Maine to sequester carbon pollution and help offset the impacts of ocean acidification on things like mussels and oysters. The results were promising, with evidence that farmed seaweed could help restore elemental balance in the sea while also serving as a viable form of commercial aquaculture. It was a win-win for the planet and for local ocean-based economies already grappling with pollution problems and declining fisheries.

Right around this same time, a research paper came out of Australia noting the methane-reducing abilities of a certain seaweed when used as a feed additive for cows. It quickly piqued Price’s interest. “The seaweed they were using wasn’t the best for real-world application,” says Price. “It was invasive and needed to be cultivated in the ocean or in very large, expensive pools on land. But the methane reduction was real. This was clearly something worth exploring.”

In the near decade since, Price and her network of colleagues have dived headlong into the pursuit of seaweed as a solution for greenhouse gas pollution. The real excitement, however, began when the team branched out from seaweed and carbon sequestering to seaweed, microalgae, and the reduction of methane pollution.

A potential game-changer

According to the United Nations, methane – a greenhouse gas 28 to 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period – currently accounts for roughly one third of excessive global heating. More to the point, approximately 16% of all global methane emissions comes from cow burps. That’s right, cows and their relentless propensity for belching are doing some major damage to our balance of life on Earth (and contrary to popular belief, it’s cow burps, not cow farts, that are the problem). Given our global dependency on dairy cows and cattle, the idea of taming these toxic burps becomes imperative. For example, in the United States alone, 11% of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from methane and the overwhelming majority of that is due to cow burps.

Remarkably, what Price and her many collaborators have found, is that they can massively reduce the amount of methane coming from a cow by introducing a simple feed additive to their diet. “In some instances, we are seeing reduction levels of 90%, she says. “What we are working on has a real chance to be an effective and scalable solution for methane pollution.”

Essentially a probiotic derived from seaweeds or microalgae can all but erase the methane that comes from a cow burp before it ever even happens. “These are game-changing numbers that we are seeing. It is a super effective tool [at reducing methane pollution] without impacting any aspect of the animal’s life cycle.” Says Price. “When you consider the research we are doing here at Bigelow and some of the stuff our colleagues are doing all around the world right now, it’s thrilling. You start to think about solutions on a grander scale. There is very real potential to have big impacts on our global greenhouse gas emissions. I can’t tell you how exciting this is for all of us working on it.”

To date, the feed supplements that researchers have been using have been derived from various sugar kelps, red kelps (like the Asparagopsis used in the early Australian experiments), Irish moss, and a variety of other microalgae, with over 3,000 different strains still being evaluated. When turned into a probiotic for cows, these additives typically account for only 2% of a cow’s feed mix. And, while the research is still underway, early returns are indicating that the practice is not only non-toxic for humans and cows alike but also, at least in some cases, cows that are producing less gas from their guts seem able to produce  more milk and beef. Adding to the excitement is the fact that these additives derived from certain microalgae don’t need an ocean to be produced. They can be grown on farm, so to speak, and also be used in manure management, as well as the reduction of gas emissions from lagoons and ponds.

“If you talk about solutions, you get ears. Turns out, people really like to have hope,” says Price. “We still have a ways to go in terms of the necessary approvals required to bring something like this to market. And then there is the issue of actually getting dairy farmers and ranchers to adopt it. It is never easy to get from the lab to the real world.” But for the first time in her career, Price feels that she is working on something that provides real solutions to the very real problems we are facing. “The amount of work that needs to happen and the hurdles we still face can overwhelm me at times, but the feeling of hope is real. We are only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what microalgae and seaweed can provide for food production worldwide. It is a thrilling place to be.”