236 MARINE FISHERIES OF NORTH CAROLINA 



particles in marketing nitrogen-fixing, root nodule bacteria; it has been 

 suggested as a constituent of the "mud" used in drilling oil wells. 



COSMETICS. Greaseless ointments of various types often contain agar or 

 agaroid; it serves to stabilize emulsions, as a moisture control agent or 

 cream-former in tooth pastes, shaving creams, hand lotions, deodorants, 

 sunburn creams, and other preparations. 



MISCELLANEOUS. Agar is important in studies on the physics of hydro- 

 philic, gel-forming colloids; it is a vehicle for plant hormones for Avena 

 type tests; it is used in chemistry to flocculate barium sulfate precipitates; 

 it is valuable as an embedding substance for small pieces of plant or animal 

 tissue that might otherwise become lost in solutions, and for cutting material 

 with a freezing microtome. 



THE AGAR INDUSTRY OF CALIFORNIA 



Agar was first manufactured in the United States in California in 1920. 

 The seaweed Gelidium cartilagineum was used, a species similar to G. 

 amansii, the principal agar source in Japan. The American industry barely 

 managed to exist for the first 20 years because of competition from low- 

 priced Japanese agar, a result of the cheapness of labor in Japan. Important 

 labor-saving improvements in the manufacturing process and production 

 of agar superior in purity and uniformity to that from Japan were factors 

 that saved California's industry. The principal difficulty in California is 

 the necessity of employing divers using a complete suit and pulling seaweed 

 from the rocks by hand. Collecting is limited to summer months and then 

 to days of good weather. 



The California industry immediately expanded with the outbreak of 

 war and within a year was producing enough agar to meet our domestic 

 wartime requirements for bacteriological agar, with some for export to 

 Allied nations. Since the war, California factories have again closed down. 



THE AGAR INDUSTRY OF NORTH CAROLINA 



Agar had never been produced along the Atlantic coast of the United 

 States until 1943 when the Van Sant Company of Beaufort, N. C, undertook 

 commercial production as a result of the discovery in 1942 at Duke Uni- 

 versity's marine laboratory that agar could be produced from Gracilaria 

 confervoides of North Carolina, and that there was an abundance, of com- 

 mercial importance, of this species near Beaufort. Pilot plant operations 

 were carried on at the American Chlorophyll Co., Alexandria, Virginia. The 

 Beaufort factory was originally built by Coca Cola interests for the purpose 

 of extracting theobromine from cocao shells. War cut off sources of raw 



