Transcriber: Emma Gon Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Several months ago, we were diving off Plymouth Sound,
and we discovered something quite unusual, something very rare.
Nestled in the seagrass bed at the base of one of the plants
was a long-snouted or spiny seahorse.
Hello, my name is Mark Parry.
I work at the Ocean Conservation Trust,
based in the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, in the United Kingdom.
Here in Plymouth, we’re trying to understand
how we restore a vital ecosystem to our marine environment.
They’re a group of plants that evolved to live from the land
completely submerged in our marine environment,
and they are seagrasses.
Having worked for the Ocean Conservation Trust
as a seagrass ecologist now for seven years,
I have done hundreds of seagrass dives
and seahorses are strongly associated with seagrasses in different parts of the UK;
however, we’ve never seen one in Plymouth Sound.
So it was a really quite special event
and very encouraging to see that these really rare animals are using
Plymouth Sound as home and habitat.
Seagrass is a unique set of plants.
They were once terrestrial plants,
and they've evolved to live back in the marine environment.
So they are a true plant -
they need to photosynthesize, they have a root structure,
and because of that, what they managed to do
is turn bare sediments into rich diverse ecosystems.
So sea grasses are very valuable for all sorts of reasons,
but they’re a nursery and hatchery for many of our commercial fish species,
so really, really important habitats.
Seagrasses are one of our secret weapons in the fight against climate change.
They take carbon from the environment
to form their bodies, and they emit oxygen.
However, seagrasses store carbon
in a slightly different way than terrestrial forests.
The majority of carbon within a terrestrial forest
is within the aboveground biomass,
where seagrasses and other blue carbon habitats sequester that carbon,
placing that carbon into the sediments
where it can’t remineralize back into the carbon cycle.
Plymouth is working to understand how we restore seagrasses,
and here at the National Marine Aquarium,
we have a laboratory built for growing seedlings
ready for transplantation into the environment,
and we’re also trialling techniques using seeds.
In the laboratory, we are growing tens of thousands of plants
to restore eight hectares of seagrass over the south coast of England.
The dive team during the summer collected in the region of three million seeds
over the course of August.
We brought those back, they have been tended to very carefully,
and what we’re trying to do is reintroduce seeds and plantlets
back into Plymouth Sound
to restore some of the seagrass meadows that have historically been lost.
Plymouth has just been nominated as the first national marine park in the UK.
That’s for lots of reasons - economic, recreational, and ecological -
and we’re hoping over the course of this five-year project
and the creation of this park to enhance the important ecology of seagrass
and perhaps double the amount of seagrass that we have within Plymouth Sound.
Seagrasses have multiple pressures around the UK:
There’s pollution, physical disturbance,
and what I would hope is that communities become more mindful
about their impact on the nearshore area by thinking what they put on their garden
and what they put down the toilet or down the drain
because ultimately that ends up in our coastal waters,
affecting our wonderful marine life.
The long-term aim of our work here with the Ocean Conservation Trust
is that we understand how to restore British seagrass meadows
and with an estimated 90% loss in the last 100 years,
there are 80,000 hectares possibly available for restoration.
And if we can understand
how we restore these important ecological features,
then what we also restore is the benefit
that a community gains from a natural habitat.
So in the case of seagrasses,
we gain carbon sequestration,
we gain fishery support through nursery and hatchery
for some of our commercial fish species,
we gain cleaning of coastal waters, and sediment stabilization.
So whilst I’ve witnessed segregation of seagrass beds
across the southwest of the UK,
I’ve also seen a change in attitudes, and those attitudes are positive,
and one of care and sustainability for the environment.
So with this change in attitudes,
my hope for the future would be that we could conserve what’s left
and restore what we’ve lost.
Thanks for listening.