What we do

We collect the version of sargassum the research is mostly missing.

Pelagic sargassum spends weeks or months in open water before it reaches a coastline. During that time it is a living system: photosynthesizing, accumulating material from the water column, hosting a specific microbial community. The moment it washes ashore and begins to decay, that system changes rapidly and irreversibly. Most sampling happens after landfall, for obvious logistical reasons. We think those logistical reasons have shaped what the science knows and does not know about this material.

About this page

This page is written for the people most likely to be skeptical of us: researchers and analytical scientists. The specific research questions, collection regions, and process detail are not on this page. That conversation happens after a mutual NDA. The contact form takes two business days to answer.

What that means for our collection work

The collection discipline, in plain language.

We collect in open water, before the material makes landfall, with the surrounding seawater it has been living in. We document conditions at the collection site, characterize the material on-site before it changes, and prepare samples according to what the downstream analysis requires. Chain of custody is not an afterthought. It is the whole point.

The four stages

Click any stage for a deeper description.

What we are not

The half of the page most people want us to write.

We are not a publishing lab. We do not have instruments. We are the field collection and sample preparation arm that serious research programs need and rarely have the capacity to run in open-water conditions. The value we add is in what we deliver to a partner lab and the documentation that comes with it.

What good samples look like

The shape of a sample you can defend in a paper.

A good sample from us comes with:

  • Collection coordinates and conditions
  • Tide and weather data
  • Time from collection to preparation
  • Baseline characterization of the material
  • Documentation of any decisions made in the field that affected the sample

We are not cutting corners on any of that because the science downstream depends on it.

If you work in analytical chemistry, marine biology, or a related field and you have wanted access to well-documented pelagic sargassum samples, we should talk.