Polar bears dive into eelgrass restoration project

The Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine program held a coastal resiliency workshop recently to teach community members how to restore local waters by creating and planting eelgrass meadows in the waters off the North Fork.

Using bins of eelgrass shoots, members of the North Fork Polar Bears —  a group that enjoys cold water plunges in local waters all winter — wove eelgrass shoots into a disc-shaped biodegradable burlap base.

Meadows of eelgrass are the most biodiverse marine habitats in the region, according to CCE Marine program. The eelgrass beds also lessen erosion from storms, capture excess nutrients and sequester carbon to combat ocean acidification and climate change.         

“It’s a great, great species, but unfortunately, we’ve seen a heavy decline of it in recent decades for a variety of reasons, and it’s really slow to come back on its own,” said Kim Barbour, director of the “Back to the Bays” initiative, at the start of Sunday’s workshop with the polar bear club, which sponsored the event with money raised during last year’s Polar Bear cold plunge fundraiser. 

With the new eelgrass meadow plantings, “what was a parking lot, all of a sudden is a little [underwater] forest,” Ms. Barbour told the group. “And we see instant habitat utilization — it’s really exciting. When we’re down there we see fish immediately start to like, come check it out, which is really great.”

Kim Manzo, the CCE’s Marine Meadows program manager, said that for valuable local species like fish, “habitat is probably one of the most important qualities.

Pretty much every species of animal utilizes eelgrass at some point in its life, if it’s a species out here, it’s known as a nursery ground.

“So all of our little baby fluke flounders, corgis — all of our local fish that we love to eat — congregate in these areas when they’re young. They can survive to be adults if they happen to find an eelgrass meadow to grow up in. They have almost 10 times better chance of surviving as well as maturing faster if they find an eelgrass meadow.”

Seahorses also breed in eelgrass meadows, Ms. Manzo said.

“They evolved to live in eelgrass. That’s why they look like they do. So if you love seahorses, that’s another reason to plant eelgrass.”

The North Fork’s native seahorse species, “northern-lined seahorse,” are protected from being collected in the wild thanks to state legislation, but have a very limited habitat left to grow in — with eelgrass meadows having declined drastically over the last century. The CCE Marine program has been working to restore and plant eelgrass meadows for decades, and there’s still plenty more work to do, Ms. Manzo and Ms. Barbour told the polar bear volunteers.

The CCE Marine program managers brought about 1500 individual strands of eelgrass to Sunday’s event, which were then woven into their burlap bases, to be planted in local waters this week.

“The idea is those [discs] get buried into the bottom, and the burlap biodegrades in a season or two, which gives times for the plant to root itself,” Ms. Barbour said.

This week, Ms. Manzo and Ms. Barbour, who are also CCE Marine divers, will plant the roughly 150 new plants in the Peconic Bay off Sterling Harbor in Greenport.

North Fork Polar Bears co-founder Patricia Garcia-Gomez said that Sunday’s event was “our first expression of our partnership with ‘Back to the Bays,’ and the first time that we get to do something positive for the sea.”

 After some work on eelgrass meadows, the polar bears plan to expand into planting oyster stock. Ms. Garcia-Gomez said it’s essential to honor and protect the fragile local marine environment, especially for a group that cold plunges in local waters every weekend all winter.

“These are the waters we’re surrounded by and we’re in them,” she said. “Let’s do what we can as people to help restore them — and we can do a lot.”