Towards The Restoration Of Seaweed In Underwater Forests
Introduction: Crayweed scientifically known as phyllospora comosa used to be an abundant form of habitat all along the Australian Southern coastline and its disappearance went unnoticed until 2008 when an article was published regarding the lack of crayweed. This sudden disappearance was due to the poorly treated sewage dumping in the 80s. In the 90s deep ocean outlets were constructed and water quality around the coasts improved but crayweed never recovered.
These crayweed population used to be responsible for forming habitats for numerous marine creatures as well as providing a food source to them and ever since their sudden disappearance so to have their inhabitants. This has led to a rapid decline in marine biodiversity and sealife, why does this matter? All of these problems have consequences such as a lack of seafoods from these habitats such as abalone and crayfish, destruction of food webs and biodiversity and even less atmospheric carbon captured and turned into oxygen.
Literacy review: Crayweed once flourished along the Sydney coastline but they have been unable to recover all the land they once occupied. Crayweed has seen successful restorations before and this success can continue if the required attention is given to this species. but before crayweed restoration can be put into practice properly there needs to be an understanding of how we are going to achieve this and a key component of formulating an approach to restoring an organism's population in the wild is understanding how they reproduce naturally. Projects aimed at restoring crayweed populations need to understand the conditions under which they most effectively reproduce otherwise efforts to restore this species will be undermined and inefficient.
Methodology: Yes restorations have been successful in the past but we have no comparison to relate this success to due to the lack of data and research until now. By understanding crayweed’s reproductive needs we can set up our projects more efficiently and restore habitats to our coastal marine wildlife faster and better. A technique that has been utilised is to remove the crayweed from the sea bed and expose it to open air. What this does is it puts the crayweed under immense pressure and as a result when they are placed back into the water, release all their reproductive capability. This, when timed in unison, can start off as the beginning to a restoration project. However, the crayweed is unable to reproduce ever again and is unsuitable for long term restoration as this is not economically feasible due to the removal of already healthy specimens from environments and the lack of manpower and funding for this project required to be able to continue this as a long term option.
