Harvesting the seeds in hopes of a sea grass revival

OYSTER

They came to collect seeds - 20 million or more - to expand what organizers call "the largest sea grass restoration in the world."

The work is tedious and long and can be interrupted by strong wind, a heavy tide or a sting ray lounging in the shallows.

It requires a wet suit, a snorkel and mask, a laundry bag and the ability to know the difference between a blade of underwater grass and a flowering stalk of grass.

Here on the yellow stalks, amid a meadow of swaying green, is where the seeds reside, like tiny peas in a pod.

"Ten years ago, you couldn't find a blade of grass in here," said Bob Orth, an aquatic plants specialist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "Today, there's more than 1,400 acres of continuous beds - just amazing."

On Tuesday, Orth and a team of volunteers from VIMS, The Nature Conservancy and the University of Virginia pulled their boats gingerly into South Bay, a shallow body of water off Virginia's Eastern Shore, just behind Wreck Island on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

The boats had motored about five miles east from the town of Oyster before reaching this biggest grass bed - a dark-green mass of wavering plants where baby crabs, clams, sea snails, fish, worms, and even sea horses can live, hide and feed.

Where the blanket ends, the water's color returns to its light-green self.

A powerful hurricane and a mysterious disease wiped out almost all submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, from these coastal bays in 1933. Gone, too, was a thriving bay scallop industry, which has never returned.

For more than 60 years, the seaside bays from Chincoteague to Oyster remained bald and empty. Then, in 1998, Orth and some students started replanting eel grass by hand, shoving plugs into the sandy bottom.

After years of trial and error - scientists now call it "adaptive management" - they figured out the best remedy, which turned out to be the easiest method: skip the back-breaking replanting and instead collect the stalks, remove the seeds and sprinkle them like fertilizer pellets atop targeted waterways.

Then watch them grow.

There is bitter irony here, though. The same method has not succeeded in restoring these key ecological beds in the Chesapeake Bay, contributing to the once-mighty estuary's slow, steady decline.

Without grasses, the Bay lacks habitat for crabs and shellfish and does not breathe life-sustaining oxygen into the water as before.

But in four coastal bays off the Eastern Shore - South Bay, Cobb Bay, Spider Crab Bay and Hog Island Bay - the results have been phenomenal.

"You read all the time about restoration efforts in the Chesapeake Bay not working. But here, it's so great to be involved in such a successful program," said Barry Truitt, a senior scientist with The Nature Conservancy, an international environmental group.

The conservancy owns and protects most of the barrier islands on the Eastern Shore and has worked closely with Orth, state officials and other scientists in bringing back the grasses.

Why the difference here?

Seaside water is slightly colder than in the Bay, by about 2 degrees. And there are few nutrients from shoreline development and storm drains, which can spark algae growth and sully water quality so grasses cannot survive.

Eel grass is the predominant species in the lower Chesapeake Bay, as well as on the Eastern Shore. But it is highly susceptible to warm waters, as shown by a massive die-off in 2005 in beds around Newport News, Hampton and Poquoson.

With climate change creating slightly higher water temperatures, some wonder if eel grass can ever come back in the Chesapeake.

"If we could just re-create some of the same conditions in the Bay that we see here, we now know we can restore eel grasses," Orth said. "It can work."

The objective this week is to capture about 20 million seeds from existing plants, cure them in a new facility just opened in the town of Oyster, and spread them around this fall in the coastal bays, as well as in the York and James rivers off the Chesapeake.

The project is so labor-intensive that The Nature Conservancy recruited volunteer divers and snorkelers this spring. More than 100 answered the call, and about 50 completed the training to come out and help.

Dawn Barnes, a nurse and lifelong diver from Chesapeake, is one of the new recruits. She culled seeds Monday and Tuesday in South Bay.

"Oh my gosh, it's fantastic," she said during a lunch break Tuesday. "It's such a worthwhile project, and really is very easy."

Barnes discovered a sea horse in one thicket and was excited by its size and grace. "Just beautiful," she said.

The volunteers, including students from Old Dominion University who assisted Friday, were instructed to grab the yellow stalks and shove them into a laundry bag around their necks.

The loads would be taken back to Oyster and emptied into large tanks. The seeds will release themselves from their pods in the summer and then will be collected for a fall sprinkling.

The new seed facility opened about two weeks ago, courtesy of a $25,000 grant from the Norfolk Foundation.

Orth said he started the grasses project with "almost nothing," just a small grant from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

Today, though, his budget has swollen to about $250,000 a year, with state, federal and private groups contributing to the cause, led by the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program, as part of its Seaside Heritage project that supports oyster restoration, eco-tourism and, of course, the grasses.

Much of the work to date has been conducted in coastal bays that were set aside as grass sanctuaries by the state. Orth expects to sprinkle seeds this year in public waters. He worries about possible conflicts with recreational and fishing boats, whose propellers can cut long scars in the beds.

But his anxiety quickly subsides when he considers how far the restoration work has come, and where it might go. "We can work something out to keep this going," he said.

With a stiff wind blowing Tuesday, the volunteers received instructions from Orth before flopping into South Bay and starting their hunt for seeds.

"There may be an occasional ray," he said, "but don't worry, they shouldn't bother you. Just don't stop to hug them."

With that, the divers donned their snorkels and masks, adjusted their wet suits and jumped into the 3-foot-deep waters.

They scattered across the bay, swimming with the sun at their backs so the yellow glare of the grass stalks would shimmer like gold.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com