MARINE AQUAPONICS RESEARCH
Southwest Florida’s sea-green delicacy
BY HAYLEY RUTGER
Sea purslane is a special veggie — freshly crisp and tender, pleasantly salty and rich in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals — but that’s not the only reason it has its very own, new cookbook. This salt-tolerant “sea vegetable” is being grown in an experimental, eco-friendly system by southwest Florida marine scientist Dr. Kevan Main, whose farm-to-table research emphasizes raising sea veggies together with seafood (redfish), using marine aquaponics to turn fish waste into plant fertilizer. Main, a Senior Scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota County, Florida, developed the new “Sea Purslane Cookbook” to help local eaters enjoy this beach-dwelling vegetable and encourage forward-thinking farmers to cultivate it. “Our goal is to help sustainable farms start doing this — farming seafood and sea vegetables in recirculating aquaculture systems that contribute to local food production,” Main said. “Freshwater resources are limited, so one of the only ways to expand food production is through seafood and sea vegetable production — and we need to identify marine plants that can be farmed to provide new sources of vegetables. So far those include seaweeds, sea purslane and sea asparagus, and I hope this new cookbook highlights the exciting potential of sea purslane.” The “Sea Purslane Cookbook” is brimming with recipes for appetizers, soups, salads and entrées for virtually any palate: Purslane chicken curry, black barley, purslane and walnut salad, numerous
delicious purslane-seafood pairings and much more. The recipes show this veggie’s international range — with Italian-style pasta dishes, Chinese-style stir fry, and various other recipes evoking the Middle East to the American Southwest. Sea purslane is sold in Caribbean farmers markets and widely grown in many Asian and European regions. It lives on sand dunes and stabilizes shores in Florida. However, its culinary and agricultural potential is largely untapped in the United States. At Mote Aquaculture Research Park in Sarasota, Florida, Main developed and maintains the prototype aquaponics greenhouse growing rows of sea purslane hydroponically in high-nutrient, brackish (part salt) water, together with the popular sportfish red drum (redfish) and a self-contained circulation and filtration system. Filters clean the water, allowing bacteria to break down harmful ammonia into other nitrogen-rich compounds used to fertilize the purslane roots. Once the water is cleaned, it is returned to the fish. The system recycles 100 percent of its water. Since the system launched in 2014, Main and colleagues have: described its operations in peer-reviewed, scientific literature to help enable others to adopt this local, food production technology; hosted tours for local chefs and seafood distributors; and
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