As many of my fellow interns and Hatfield summer inhabitants have heard, I dedicated a majority of this past week to the task of scraping mud off of grass. The scientific version of this activity is “processing seagrass for morphological data and epiphyte biomass.” However, I was essentially scraping mud off of grass.

Seagrasses are a diverse group of vascular flowering marine plants that are more related to terrestrial grass than any of the photosynthetic organisms in the sea. For a quick history of earth’s plants: in the Precambrian time period, the first plant life began in the ocean, by the Silurian period some these organisms had migrated onto land and were evolving as land plants. Fast forward to the Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago), and some land plants were re-invading the ocean. Today, the ancestors of these invaders are mangroves and seagrasses. Fundamentally, seagrass is a terrestrial grass that no longer lives on land.

Seagrasses are distributed around the world in tropical, temperate, and even sub-polar environments. As primary producers that grow in high density, similar to terrestrial grasses, seagrasses are the foundation species of seagrass habitats. They add oxygen to the water, attenuate wave energy, trap sediment, and act as a nursery for many marine species. Although often outcompeted by other stable environmental states such as coral reefs and kelp forests, seagrasses are present in nearly every coastal region around the world, answering the primary question to the work I have been doing “Why study seagrass?”

Now for the next question “Why scrape mud off of seagrass?” What I was actually doing was scraping the epiphytes (organisms that grow on top of another organism in a non-parasitic manner) off of the seagrass. The epiphytes provide surface area for the mud to stick to, making the blades (and my fingers) very muddy. For clarification, I did also gently rinse the blades to remove any outstanding mud and sediment clumps. Epiphytes are viewed as an indicator of nutrient levels (more epiphytes= more nutrients) as well as provide insight into the state of the ecosystem. Epiphytes are beneficial as they are a food source for primary and secondary consumers, but also pose the disadvantage of competition for nutrients and light to the seagrass.

After scraping off the epiphytes, I would dry the mud/epiphyte concoction to remove the water and obtain mass, and measure the length of width of the seagrass samples. The seagrass that I was processing was from multiple bays in the Pacific Northwest, each with three different treatment environments of: seagrass bed, oyster aquaculture bed, and edge between aquaculture and seagrass beds. The variation (or lack thereof) of epiphyte mass and seagrass size will give us insight into the type and level of impact that oyster aquaculture has on seagrass and the local ecosystem.

This project is one that I am truly excited to be a part of. I am using research to better understand how humans are impacting the environment, am learning first-hand from other ecologists about the local ecology and aquaculture methods, and am realizing my dream of improving the environment through research. Although I joke about doing the stereotypical “intern grunt-work” with grass and mud, this internship has only confirmed my career choice. I would much rather be spending my internship and summer handling grass and mud than sitting in front of a computer all day.

An example of how the seagrass beds look here in Oregon estuaries

Special thank you to my professors Dr. Fong and Dr. Willette for teaching me about the world of seagrass. All information in this blog post was provided from their lecture material.