Meet the team restoring critically important underwater forests | Discovery | Gardening Australia
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- Опубликовано: 28 янв 2022
- Costa joins a dedicated team of researchers, scientists and volunteers working to restore Sydney’s critically important underwater forests. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
It’s hard to imagine that 70km of forest and meadow habitat adjacent to one of our biggest cities disappeared without anyone noticing. But, in the 1980s, this is exactly what happened between Palm Beach and Cronulla on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and it took decades until people realised. The reason? This missing forest grew from the seafloor and shallow reefs of Sydney’s beaches and bays, and the dominant plant was Crayweed, a type of temperate seaweed.
Professor Adriana Verges, a marine ecologist based at UNSW and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, is leading the Operation Crayweed campaign, alongside Dr Ziggy Marzinelli and Derrick Cruz. They are committed to educating people on the importance of these underwater landscapes, and seaweed. “When beachgoers think of seaweed, it is often something that is seen as an annoyance. When gardeners think of seaweed, it is as a garden additive, but it is so much more than that,” she says. “They may not be glamorous, but they’re incredibly important. They provide critical food and habitat that supports hundreds of species. Just like trees on the land, seaweeds form vast underwater forests that underpin coastal food webs, all while capturing atmospheric carbon and producing oxygen. Temperate seaweed forests are in decline worldwide, due to human activities, and that is what we have seen here along Sydney’s beaches,” explains Adriana. “There are dense forests of Crayweed (Phyllospora comosa) - a beautiful, large golden-coloured seaweed - all the way from Port Macquarie to Tasmania. It was abundant along the Sydney coastline, but sometime during the 1980s, it disappeared completely from the metropolitan area. We believe that the high volumes of sewage that were pumped directly onto Sydney’s beaches and bays before the 1990s likely caused this decline.”
And although the water quality in Sydney has improved dramatically since this time, the crayweed forests have not returned naturally. “This is the aim of Operation Crayweed - to bring crayweed back to reefs where it once flourished and to re-establish this essential habitat and food source for Sydney’s coastal marine biodiversity.”
Crayweed plays an important role in the environment because it provides habitat for hundreds of species, including rock lobster (or crayfish, hence its name!), abalone and small critters known as epifauna. “The loss of large seaweeds like crayweed from temperate reefs is akin to losing corals from tropical reefs,” says Adriana. “When trees are cut down, people notice and become vocal, but the underwater reefs remain ‘out of sight, out of mind' to many,” she says. “There is a crucial connection between the underwater world and our terrestrial way of life - we depend upon healthy fisheries for food, thriving coastlines for protection as well as play, and underwater forests to draw down carbon amid accelerating global warming. This is why reforestation through Operation Crayweed is so vital.”
But this is not a straightforward revegetation project. “It’s not as simple as sowing seeds and hoping for the best,” explains Adriana. “Essentially, we have to harvest fertile, adult crayweed from existing healthy populations and transplant them to these deforested areas.” This is not a process of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. “We harvest comparatively small amounts of mature crayweed from large, established forests, ensuring that we cause no damage or negative impact to these healthy, thriving populations.” They also collect widely, to ensure the new population is genetically diverse.
Featured Plants:
CRAYWEED - Phyllospora comosa
Filmed on Garigal Country | Palm Beach and Freshwater, NSW
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Развлечения
I love seeing these initiatives.... 👍👍👍👍👍
Wow... Underwater garden.. You are making the world better. Thank you guys. Love from India.
Costa you keep on keeping on. You are perfect ambassador to be show what we can do. From Lismore North Coast NSW. When will you come North.
Amazing work. Thank you to all involved in this project, and for raising awareness.
Gardening in the ocean.... never thought about that before
The ocean is everybody's garden
Bud stuff bud doin grate yeah we gonna bud yeah keep givin us d storie bud all rite bro.
Nice video👍👍
Молодцы 👍
Plus, seaweed can be used to feed livestock, much healthier for the animals, and it minimises methane output, thus helping with the greenhouse effect.
Australia should definitely be doing this for its livestock. So much more sustainable, some seaweed can grow a foot a day😀
Sir do you know video tutorial in processing seaweed into livestock feeds?
How do they remove the plastic mat once the crayweed is attached? Doesn't the crayweed attach over the plastic mat and thus the plastic becomes a layer between the rock and the crayweed?
Or did I miss something?
If it's got a Forest growing on top of it it can stay as long as plastic needs to be minerals again and future plants will eat the minerals ?
I assume the plastic only covers small areas to seed surrounding areas of rock/reef with more plants. I guess any crayweed plants on the plastic goes with it when removed, but they could be reused again if healthy??
For clarification on my question the plastic mat is being used to anchor all of the crayweed being planted. That is, every piece of crayweed and their offspring are growing on plastic mat because they are unable to be fixed directly to the rock once removed from their donor habitats.
The claim in the video is that the plastic mat is somehow removed once the crayweed is established. I can understand that any mat without crayweed growing on it can be removed, but I'm unsure how they removed the plastic mat from between the crayweed and the rock.
The problem with plastics in waterways, and why the video addresses their use specifically, is that through a mixture of tidal action, UV light and bacteria micro plastics will become part of the water column and cause further damage to wildlife in the area. Even a 1cm x 1cm square of plastic will break down into hundreds of thousands of micro plastic pieces and will be more than enough to cause significant disease in the immediate area.
That's why it's interesting to hear how they're managing to remove all of the plastic from the site.
@@tjmarx it's a good question! we manually remove the plastic mats a couple of years after the restoration (once the craybies have completely taken off in the surrounding area. We have tried many alternative biodegradable materials (like coconut fibre, compostable 'plastic') but they don't work because they break down too quickly, as we plant this in very wave-exposed areas.
Hi@@adrianaverges are you involved directly in the project?
My question relates to the plastic mat that cray weed is growing on, as opposed to the empty pieces of mat. It seems to me physically impossible to remove the plastic mat without disrupting the cray weed.
How are you removing all of the plastic, or does some of the plastic mat, that being the pieces the cray weed is planted on, remain in the ocean after the retrieval process?
Great work guys, sexy legs Costa xx