Well, that was not the intent when I started this experiment 3 years ago. With the help of many, many people, I constructed large artificial seagrass units in order to test the impacts of changing habitat on scallop life history - in particular, their recruitment, and subsequent growth and survival. This was a great plan. And over the past years, I was able to record some very interesting (and somewhat surprising) results. However, I have left these artificial seagrass mats on the bay bottom over the winters. Now they collect macroalgae. And a lot of it! This week, I had to visit the site twice, one day to remove the algae and clean off my mats - this was mostly green fleece (Codium fragile), sea lettuce (Ulva) and Gracillaria. We filled at least a dozen large catch bags full of algae, and there was still more. But I guessed we had removed at least most of it. When we went back the next day to put out some recruitment collectors, I was clearly mistaken. There was plenty of the seaweeds still on my mats. So in the process of doing our work, we also removed more algae. Its a dirty job (take that Mike Rowe), but somebody's (me) got to do it. And now, I am confident that my artificial seagrass is no longer quite as infested with algae, and is behaving the way I want it to - like natural seagrass meadows. Stay tuned for the results.
Oh yeah, and thanks to Brooke Rodgers for the lovely photo!
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