Seagrass restoration is world's largest

Delmarva.com: Seagrass restoration is world's largest

WRECK ISLAND -- Several miles east of Oyster in South Bay, volunteers are performing what looks like underwater yoga.

Wearing goggles and snorkels, they dip and walk through the shallow waterway, collecting seeds to replenish a vital plant absent for decades.

Each summer, they come from as far as Richmond and Charlottesville to take part in the world's largest seagrass restoration project, mobilized by The Nature Conservancy in partnership with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Virginia Coastal Management Program.

"Without all these hands to pick this grass, we wouldn't get as many seeds," said Bo Lusk, marine steward with the conservancy.

Planting close to 400 acres of eelgrass on the Eastern Shore's seaside has spread, resulting in 4,500 acres of thriving underwater beds.

Lusk described the beds as vast, underwater meadows, providing vital habitat to bay scallops and other marine organisms.

"Scallops need eelgrass," Lusk said. "It really helps them avoid predators for the first part of their lives."

Before the beds were destroyed in the 1930s, scallop harvests reached more than one million pounds annually -- worth $14 million in today's economy.

With the restoration of seagrass beds, scientists can also hope to restore the scallop population.

Other creatures, like crabs, clams and small fish, call the beds home, providing food for larger fish and waterfowl.

Eelgrass beds also help reduce sediment in the water.

"Water flows over an eelgrass bed, and that water slows down so the sediment settles out of it," Lusk said. "It helps keep things clear."

The University of Virginia Eastern Shore Lab has found evidence that eelgrass beds help dampen wave action, possibly preventing shoreline erosion.

Prior to the conservancy's efforts to restore the habitats, the Eastern Shore was without seagrass beds for almost 70 years. A pandemic disease weakened and killed eelgrass in the 1930s, with remaining beds decimated by a 1933 hurricane.

"That storm was really the nail in the coffin that did in our eelgrass," Lusk said. "We didn't have a surviving seed source here on the Eastern Shore."

That began to change in 1999 when VIMS Professor Robert Orth discovered a revolutionary method for reviving underwater grasses.

Previous restoration efforts involved a labor-intensive process of planting eelgrass by hand, but Orth discovered a new technique that required only eelgrass seeds.

In 2002, volunteers began aiding in the conservancy's restoration efforts. In a narrow time window during the summer, they are taken to an offshore site to collect fertile shoots during low tide.

The shoots are placed in tanks in the Oyster harbor, where they are pumped with fresh seawater and air. After several weeks of development, the seeds pop from the plants and settle on the bottom of the tanks. Seeds are then sieved and ready to be distributed in the fall.

"What we're doing is speeding up nature," Lusk said. "If you get eelgrass growing in enough places, it will spread wherever it belongs."

"When we started here, there was just one patch of grass," Nature Conservancy Chief Conservation Scientist Barry Truitt said of the South Bay site.

"It's just amazing," he said.