WOODLAND SUPERHEROES STUDIOS
“I didn’t think something that tiny could keep people wondering for forty whole years.”
– Rowan
I was eating toast when Dad showed me a picture of some seaweed on our iPad.
It was pink.
Really pink.
And tiny.
I looked at him.
“That’s it?”
He laughed.
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. Something bigger.”
It didn’t look like something people would spend years trying to find.
It looked like something I probably wouldn’t even notice if it was stuck to my shoe.
Then Dad told me scientists had been wondering what it was for more than 40 years.
I thought he meant they had lost it.
They sort of had.
But not exactly.
A scientist called Professor Christine Maggs first came across this tiny red seaweed back in the early 1980s.
She thought it might be something nobody had properly identified before.
But there was a problem.
There wasn’t enough of it to be sure.
So the question stayed open.
For years.
And years.
And loads more years.
I tried to work out how old Dad would have been when she first saw it.
Then I realised he wasn’t even born yet.
Eventually, divers studying the seabed off Cornwall found living pieces of the same tiny seaweed.
Scientists were able to grow it, look at it properly and study its DNA.
And this time they had enough information.
It really was a species new to science.
I kept looking at the photograph because I couldn’t work out how something so small could stay a question for so long.
It was only a few millimetres across.
A few millimetres.
I checked that against my ruler.
That’s tiny.
I think that’s what I liked about it.
If Dad had shown me a photograph of a giant whale nobody had ever seen before, I would have understood why everyone was excited.
Of course you’d notice that.
It’s enormous.
But this wasn’t enormous.
It had been there in the sea while people swam above it, boats travelled over it and scientists studied the coast.
The divers found it in maerl beds off Cornwall. Dad showed me pictures.
They looked like little pink branches scattered across the seabed, with all sorts of things living between them.
Some maerl beds in Fal Estuary are estimated to be 4,000 years old.
This tiny seaweed was part of a whole place I hadn’t even heard of.
I asked Dad what it was called. He said scientists call it Ceramium ruenessianum, but it still doesn’t have a common name.
So I suggested Pink claw weed.
I still think it has potential.
But I kept thinking about the scientist who first noticed it. She’d carried that question for more than forty years.
I don’t know if I could wait that long to find something out.
I’m glad she didn’t forget about it.
Now I wanted to know what else lived down there. And what would happen to all those little things if the maerl beds were damaged.
Nothing underneath the water changed because I found out about it. But it changed a little bit for me.
Next time I’m by the sea, I think I’ll wonder what’s underneath.
Even the bits that just look empty.
Pink Claw Weed
There’s always something else to notice.
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