Ocean Farming Film Opens the Cinema Seriesat Casa del Herrero
A new Cinema Series has made its debut in Montecito at Casa del Herrero on Thursday evening, January 18. The film series is officially titled “Cinema at the Casa” and is focused on launching the organization as a center for creative and worldly discussions for the community. It follows suit with the Casa’s Book Club.
Sheraton Kalouria organized the first of this innovative film series. He welcomed the attendees and thanked Benjamin Goedert, Development Director at Santa Barbara International Film Festival, who suggested this first film for the series by Darcy Hennessey titled The Ocean Solution, which was shown at the 2023 SBIFF. It presents ocean farming as a viable alternative for land farming through the experience of Bren Smith, a former commercial fisherman who changed direction after a few hurricanes and location changes, to doing vertical ocean farming of kelp beds, oysters, and mussels. The film documents what Smith worked out in creating ocean farming that yields high quantities of nutritious food shown to fight climate crisis, clean the ocean, and create an aquatic habitat.
Following the viewing, an expert presentation with a Q&A was led by the head of the Nuzhdin Lab at USC, Sergey Nuzhdin PhD, the professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He stated his focus is genetics and he received his PhD from the Institute of Molecular Genetics at the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences Moscow. Nuzhdin started the genetic research of kelp five years ago, and since has created kelp seed banks and published studies of the viability of growing it as a food, biofuel, and more. His goal is to keep the seed bank and the research open to public domain, basically to not privatize the seeds. The seeds that are bred and harvested by his lab are not genetically modified.
Presenting with him were his research students, Maddelyn Harden, a PhD candidate researching the genetic diversity, variation, and evolution of California macroalgae; and Jordan Chancellor, a PhD student in the Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography program, working on sustainability and global food security, specifically the role that bivalves can play in mitigating the use of terrestrial protein sources.
On its webpage, The Nuzhdin lab outlines its mission: “The lab employs molecular biology and bioinformatic techniques to better understand the interactions between genotype and phenotype across a wide range of organisms. Currently, we are broadly interested in how these techniques can be applied to aquaculture in Southern California, specifically with seaweed and bivalves. Our research is conducted not only in a traditional molecular biology lab at Ray R. Irani Hall but also at our sustainable seaweed aquaculture facility down at AltaSea in San Pedro.”
Not to miss the next film and book club, check the website link!
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