Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
technique involved digging up healthy plants from existing beds off Point
San Pablo and replanting the shoots within plastic frames to provide sup-
port against the currents as they took root. As it turned out, few plants
took. The second technique involved harvesting eelgrass flowers, and later
scattering the seeds by hand over the site. Like transplantation, the tech-
nique had only spotty success. The third method required monitoring ma-
turing eelgrass flowers in the wild, collecting the flowers when they were
nearly ripe, and bundling several dozen into mesh bags. The bags were
then left to dangle from the undersides of buoys. As the seeds ripened,
they would break off from the fronds and drop to the bay floor. This last
technique, pioneered by researchers on the East Coast, proved the most
fruitful. But a fourth technique, affixing an eelgrass shoot directly to a bio-
degradable bamboo stick with twist ties, and then pushing it down into
the mud to cover the roots, is also proving successful. “We have such ge-
latinous sediment in San Francisco Bay, planting the shoots directly
doesn't work well. They can come loose and float away too easily,” says
Boyer's colleague Stephanie Kiriakopolis, who pioneered this new method.
To trace the rate of plant growth, researchers prick pinholes near the
base of new eelgrass blades and return weeks later to find the same plant
with the help of a GPS point. They then identify the correct plant, feel
along the leaves with their bare hands to relocate the leaf with the hole,
and measure how far the pinhole has moved up the stem.
Mesh bags full of eelgrass used in eelgrass bed restoration experiments in the
bay. (Jude Stalker)
