Sometimes nature needs a helping hand.
Vast underwater forests have gone missing from the Sydney coastline, with repercussions for local fish, ABALONE, CRAYFISH and coastal marine biodiversity.
We have a solution, but the ocean needs your help.
Thanks to Stephen Oliver and Shannon Ruddock for shooting this amazing video.
Photography courtesy of Justin Gilligan, John Turnbull (www.marineexplorer.org), Tom Burd & UNSW.
THE PROBLEM
MISSING: 70 km stretch of
underwater forest!
‘Crayweed’ (Phyllospora comosa) once formed dense beds on shallow reefs all along the Sydney coastline, but sometime during the 1980s it all disappeared!
THE SOLUTION
SEAWEED SEX
And lots of it...
Crayweed can either be male or female and their sexually produced babies attach permanently to the reef, forming the basis of a new, self-sustaining population.
THE SCIENCE
Lost evidence and
new scientific solutions.
This loss of underwater forest went unnoticed and unreported in the scientific literature until 2008, when Coleman et al. published an article...