Eelgrass is a critical habitat for fish, protects against coastal erosion and stores carbon. But it's threatened by pollution and climate change. Dozens of local scientists are working to protect and restore New England's seagrass meadows.
atthew Long peers over the side of the research boat Calanus, into the dark water of Hadley Harbor, about 2 miles from Woods Hole.
“They're a nursery habitat — a lot of young fish and crustaceans and other organisms grow up in them,” he said. “If we don't have seagrasses, we don't have bay scallops at all in these ecosystems.” “It grows pretty much like the grass on your lawn, except it can get much, much larger,” he said — up to 6 feet tall in some places.
Swampscott resident Amy Mastrogiacomo said she was surprised to learn her town has one of the largest intact eelgrass meadows on the North Shore. Once eelgrass is lost, restoring it is tricky. Historically, divers have transplanted individual shoots by hand. It’s painstaking work that requires specially-trained divers, and it hasn’t been very effective.He recalled a week in Rhode Island in 2017, moving plants from Newport to Greenwich Bay.
A researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory holds up an eelgrass plant gathered from the lab's eelgrass tanks. so far took place in Virginia. There, scientists used eelgrass seeds instead of plants. But this would be difficult to scale up because restoring a meadow can take millions of seeds, year after year.“One of the research projects right now is to try to understand, can our natural beds handle us collecting that many seeds?” said Hughes, of Northeastern.
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