Where did your interest in seaweed begin?

Well, that was yeah, that was entirely accidental because growing up on the coast and going fishing, and so I was interested in fish and invertebrates and things like that. I never even seen a seaweed. You know, I’d go to the beach, it could be covered with seaweed, but I’d never seen one. So I'm Sandra Lindstrom, and I'm curator of the phycological collection of the University of British Columbia at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. I did a masters on seaweed and I was getting to know the seaweeds pretty well. And then I went home to Alaska. When I made my first dive in Alaska, I was like, agape, because it was like going into a foreign world. It wasn't of this earth because it didn't look anything like what we see on land. And I would pull up things that I couldn't identify. So I wrote to the taxonomic experts on the coast and they said, oh well maybe it's Japanese, you know, because it's nothing we have here in California. I worked in Alaska for a few years, then I got a scholarship to go to Japan and actually work at Cape Nosappu, which is the easternmost tip of Hokkaido. So I was as close as I could get to Alaska there to see, you know, if there were seaweeds in common and it turns out that a lot of the seaweeds weren’t. There were some seaweeds that were in common, but a lot of them weren’t. And so that meant that they needed to be identified. And so that's when I decided to go back for a PhD.

So was your goal then to actually try to fill the gap of the lack of knowledge that was in Alaska?

Yeah. So I did my PhD. on the Dumontiaceae which is a northern family and some of its representatives were undescribed species and even one genus. But the interesting thing was I was starting this just when phylogenetics were starting, but before they could work with DNA, my PhD. thesis was on phylogeny of the Dumontiaceae, but based on morphology. (Interviewer) You knew when you got to Alaska and then you went over to Japan that there were not descriptions for some of the things you were seeing. (Lindstrom) Well, it took me a while to figure that out. And the other reason I was surprised is I was prejudiced. The coast of Alaska was pretty well covered by ice during the ice age and the area that I was finding these things around Juneau was under a kilometer of ice. So where did it come from? And it turned out that there's at least one endemic there that isn't closely related to anything in the Dumontiaceae, which was my family. So there there were things going on that we still don't understand.

Do you know how many new species you’ve described?

24, I think I counted at one time, but I'm. Yeah, I'm not done. At one point I went through and made a list and there was one new family. I mean, you don't do it on purpose. It's just that I was doing, my thesis was on this whole family. Well, here was this genus that really didn't fit in the family, so I had to kick it out. And then I had, you know, I had four less species to work on for my thesis. And so that's how that that family came about. And now that they've done molecular work, they've shown that it's not closely related to the Dumontiaceae at all. It is a good family.In fact, it might even be in its own order now, you know. Yeah, this, these things happened. The valuable thing about doing the consulting and other work that I've done is it's taken me all over the coast.I've been able to collect. I've been working on seaweeds here since the early seventies. I know, I know species. And now with DNA, we're figuring out that there's a lot more diversity. There's a lot of cryptic diversity here that we didn't recognize.

So it's you know, it's everything's been feeding off of each other and just allowing knowledge to grow. This is, you know, sort of another funny story. I started working on Mastocarpus because it occurs everywhere.We had one species that occurs all the way from Mexico, all the way around the coast of Alaska, you know, out into the Aleutians. And so I thought, well, this would be a good species to look at Phylogeography. You know, what changes may have occurred due to glaciation, You know, there were isolation and recolonization and so on. So I started collecting Mastocarpus up and down the coast. Well, we started with two species, and I think we ended up with 11.So that's a sort of complication that it is not expected. But I think considering, you know, all the problems that I've discovered along the way that need solutions, they're going to be other things that people in the future are going to discover that need solutions.