EMERALD 



WAVES 

 OF GRASS 



By Michael Weaver 



Their boats were all but 

 loaded down and gassed 

 up when the word 

 reached clam fishermen 

 last December: You can't 

 kick for clams in these 

 waters, the state said. 

 There's grass here. 

 Grass? 

 Seagrass. 

 It had covered so 

 much of the estuary floor 

 through Core Sound that 

 fisheries officials closed 

 20 percent of the 

 available clam beds off 

 Carteret County to 

 mechanical harvesting 

 that could destroy the 

 underwater lawns. 



The grass beds- 

 discovered during aerial 

 surveys last year- 

 harbor many of the 

 state's most important 

 recreational and commercial species. 

 Among the species are clams— a 

 much-sought-after mollusk that sup- 

 ports an economically important winter 

 mechanical-harvest fishery. 



Closing these newly discovered 

 grass beds had Carteret County shell- 

 fishermen angrier than a disturbed 

 hornet. They needed to harvest the 

 beds to make a living, they said. 



But is today's harvest of clams worth 

 destroying a habitat that's vital to 

 tomorrow's production of many 

 species of fish and shellfish? 



Indeed, protected seagrass beds 

 are nothing new. For years, the state 

 has protected underwater meadows 

 prized for their role as food sources 

 and refuge for thousands of sea 

 creatures. 



Young mullet, spot, blue crabs and 

 hard shell clams share the cover of 

 seagrass with adult sea trout, flounder, 

 shrimp and dozens of other species. 



Bay scallops make seagrass fields 

 their sole nursery grounds, and sea 

 turtles as well as birds from egrets to 

 osprey eat the wavy green leaves. 



Dense seagrass fields cover up to 

 200,000 acres of shallow coastal 

 waters in North Carolina, second only 

 to Florida in area. And only in North 

 Carolina does eelgrass— the most 

 common along U.S. shores— coexist 

 with two of the other 47 varieties 

 known worldwide. 



The unique habitat makes for a won- 

 derful playground for fish and shellfish, 

 an occasional battleground for fisher- 

 men and a fascinating study ground 

 for scientists. 



Salt marshes, which cover roughly 

 the same number of acres in North 

 Carolina, are certainly more visible, but 

 no more valuable, experts say. 



"These are critical nursery habitats," 

 says Gordon Thayer, a scientist with 

 the National Marine Fisheries Service 

 and an authority on seagrasses. "With- 

 out them we think we would have dif- 

 ferent animals using the habitats— and 

 a lot fewer of them." 



Marine scientists who have spent the 

 better part of careers studying sea- 

 grass still fascinate at its size, beauty 

 and productivity. A healthy patch of 

 seagrass— they vary in size from 1 

 acre to 6,000— can rival the productivi- 

 ty of a heavily farmed agriculture crop. 



"It's just teeming with all sorts of 

 things," North Carolina State University 

 botanist JoAnn Burkholder said while 

 flipping through pages of color slides 

 of the neon-green seagrass beds. 



As part of a Sea Grant research proj- 

 ect, Burkholder and NCSU zoologist 

 Larry Crowder have transplanted some 

 8,000 eelgrass shoots in a dozen 

 mesocosms, 380-gallon tanks set up 

 along the docks at Bogue Sound. 

 Their tests to determine its resistance 

 to algae and other clinging plants are 

 among the first long-term experiments 



