In ancient Hawai'i, limu was not subject to kapu based on gender, and so it was most often women — as shoreline harvesters — who came to know the names and qualities of the myriad types of seaweed that grew in Hawaiian waters.
It is no surprise then that the world's foremost expert on limu is, in fact, a Hawaiian woman — Isabella Aiona Abbott.
In the course of her long career, the 86-year-old Abbott's extensive research and voluminous publications have helped to advance not just scientific understanding but cultural awareness.
Abbott was born in Hana, Maui, and raised in Honolulu. A graduate of Kamehameha Schools, she earned degrees at the University of Hawai'i and the University of Michigan before graduating from the University of California-Berkeley in 1950 as the first Native Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science.
Abbott and her husband, Donald, taught at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station (Abbott was the first female faculty member in the school's Biological Sciences Department) for 30 years before taking early retirement in Hawai'i.
Isabella Abbott was recruited by UH to teach Hawaiian ethnobiology. In the absence of established texts, she interviewed Native Hawaiian women to get information about different kinds of limu. As she has done throughout her career, Abbott was careful to place her scientific studies within the context of Native Hawaiian life.
As a phycologist and ethnobiologist, Abbott has written eight books — including "La'au Hawai'i" and "Marine Red Algae of the Hawaiian Islands" — and more than 150 papers, earning a National Academy of Science G.M. Smith Medal in 1997.
She is an emerita professor at both Stanford (biological sciences) and UH (botany).
