In recent years, since the establishment of abalone cultivation in Chile, there has been a strong demand for fresh seaweed, mainly Macrocystis, in order to feed the abalone. Currently, in Chile, both the red abalone (Haliotis rufescens) and the Japanese abalone (Haliotis discus hannai) are being cultivated. Vásquez et al. (2006) estimated that these cultivations require an average of 500 t fresh algae per month. Moreover, this amount is continuously growing, and it has been roughly calculated that close to 1,000 t of abalone will be produced by 2010. This would require 100,000 t of brown algae. The greatest challenge for this industry is to obtain fresh algae for feeding the abalone, which has become one of the greatest limiting factors (Viana et al. 1993; Corazani and Illanes 1998; Camus 2005). Until now, the algal supply has been collected from natural kelps populations which are extracted in large volumes. This means that the collection area needs to be expanded as the algae supply is becoming exhausted near the abalone cultivation centers (Pizarro 2003), which already is the case in northern Chile (Bulboa, C. personal observation).