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These seagrass meadows are highly productive habitats that provide many ecosystem services, including protecting the coast from storms and big waves, stabilising sediment, providing safe habitats for other species and encouraging biodiversity, enhancing water quality, and sequestering carbon and nutrients. [12] [3]
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.
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 ...
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).
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 ...
Posidonia oceanica, commonly known as Neptune grass or Mediterranean tapeweed, is a seagrass species that is endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. [2] It forms large underwater meadows that are an important part of the ecosystem. The fruit is free floating and known in Italy as "the olive of the sea" (l'oliva di mare [3]).
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]