Seaweed.

It'll be a piece of kelp.

what are some examples of sustainable proteins?

Now, we grew algae in waste water, and we built tools that allowed us to get into the lives of algae so that we could monitor the way they grow, what makes them happy, how do we make sure that we're going to have a culture that will survive and thrive.

The corals say, You cheated. You didn't pay your rent.

low and behold, kelp forests emerged in shallow water.

Do you know how much algae there is in the world?

The great painter Hokusai knew it very well.

It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony.

And again, I don't want to talk about consciousness,

Live algae at 80 a pop?

After a few years, between five and seven years, fish come back, they eat the urchins, and then the algae grow again.

Caulerpa taxifolia, the so called killer algae.

(Laughter)

There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next door to you.

So let's envision what the system might look like.

The laboratory that we set up in Santa Cruz was our skunkworks.

Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?

Algae. It infected marine life.

And the Molas there, you can find them with a spotter plane very easily, and they like to hang out under floating rafts of kelp.

These are things that are getting into our food chain because of these blooms.

If you fracture it, you can look at the fact that it's nanostructured.

And then you will be dropped into the ocean.

What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle, and if Diver A has the sargassum, if that's the sound that was played and requested, then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever.

He pointed at the algae.

Oh?

So the column actually had another very nice feature, and that is the algae settle in the column, and this allowed us to accumulate the algal biomass in a context where we could easily harvest it.

Those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals.

So let me show you how the system works.

We've also described another species of bipedal octopus.

They flooded, becoming seas.

I think it's the uh... I think it's the live algae in this one.

So that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate, a single celled alga.

The waste water that leaks out is water that already now goes into that coastal environment, and the algae that leak out are biodegradable, and because they're living in waste water, they're fresh water algae, which means they can't

Most of the biomass is low on the food chain, the herbivores, the parrotfish, the surgeonfish that eat the algae.

She's kind of teasing him and taunting him.

Here's an interesting one for the IT world bio silicon.

Mediterranean Sea.

Think about some of the incredible clean technologies we have today. Wind Electric amp Solar Cars Biogas

In Fiji, they have iridescent algae that come out once a year in the water.

Our research covered the biology of the system, which included studying the way algae grew, but also what eats the algae, and what kills the algae.

liver and onions, heart, tongue, gizzard, sweetbreads once a week.

There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life.

We end up with things we've heard about before red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage.

And again, it's this incredibly exciting animal.