Short abstract:

This paper highlights the algae farmers’ daily rhythmanalysis on the marine microbes, as a process of creating ethical and aesthetic criteria and enhancing their eurythmic abilities to adapt and survive climate change, focusing on the lifecycle of brown algae, crucial for aquaculture in Japan.

Long abstract:

Climate change has led to the emergence of numerous "unfamiliar seas" along the North-Eastern Pacific coastlines in Japan, places where culturally and economically iconic fishes such as salmon have been missing for years. Fishers are adapting and exploring new ways to survive by incorporating new species from warmer seas and already domesticated species. As they seek enhanced resilience and economic competitiveness into these neo-seascape communities, they are actively engaging in updating their experiences and relationships with their seas’ material socio-ecological metabolisms.

These new relations bring new ethical challenges, including establishing boundaries for human intervention that ensure these adaptations benefit both humans and non-humans and promoting new ecological regimes that are either preferable or, at least, not worse than the current, degraded realities.

This paper highlights the fishers’ daily rhythmanalysis (cf. Lefebvre 1992) of marine microbes, as they create new ethical and aesthetic criteria for human interventions, in brown-algae aquaculture in Japan. Historically, these fishers have used the verb “waku,” or “fountain", a word that captures life rhythms and which describes a metamorphosis of microbial lifecycles, themselves affected by control of non-human systems like weather and tides; inorganic to organic; non-living to living; invisible to visible. Combining fishers’ empirical knowledge and advanced science-technology for observation and simulation, such as environmental DNA analysis, enhances their eurythmic abilities to recognize microbial polyrhythms and other non-humans. In these ways, they can promote ecological survival and socialization across species and shape new ethical and aesthetic criteria for living with “unfamiliar” seas.