Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Although seagrass meadows occupy only 0.1% of the area of the ocean floor, they account for 10–18% of the total oceanic carbon burial. [34] Currently global seagrass meadows are estimated to store as much as 19.9 Pg (petagrams or gigatons, equals a billion tons) of organic carbon. [34]
There are about 72 species of sea grass around the world, and while they cover about .1% of the seafloor, they play an important role in maintaining a healthy ocean.
Seagrass meadows provide homes for young fish and protected creatures such as seahorses and stalked jellyfish.
The meadows of the community occur as both monospecific meadows (of P. australis) or as multispecies meadows (with, for example, P. australis together with Zostera muelleri subsp. capricorni, Halophila ovalis). The macrophyte, Ruppia, may also be found growing within the ecological community (Creese et al., 2009).
These features allow the plants to stabilise the substrate, anchor themselves against currents, and change the environment. A colony may have one or several species of seagrass, and a large number of other species living within it. The area covered by seagrass in Western Australian waters is equivalent to Australia's rainforest. [2]
Few species were originally considered to feed directly on seagrass leaves (partly because of their low nutritional content), but scientific reviews and improved working methods have shown that seagrass herbivory is an important link in the food chain, feeding hundreds of species, including green turtles, dugongs, manatees, fish, geese, swans ...
Shark Bay has the largest known area of seagrass, with seagrass meadows covering over 4,000 square kilometres (1,500 sq mi) of the bay. [1] It includes the 1,030-square-kilometre (400 sq mi) Wooramel Seagrass Bank , the largest seagrass bank in the world [ 1 ] and contains a 200-square-kilometre (77 sq mi) Posidonia australis meadow formed by a ...
This seagrass is sensitive to light deprivation and a lowering of salinity in its environment. In a major flooding event in Queensland, half the seagrasses were lost in a shallow study area in Moreton Bay, the Syringodium isoetifolium disappearing almost completely while Zostera muelleri and other seagrass species survived, relatively unaffected. [4]