Weaving New Life Into The Long Island Sound

Save the Sound, part of Connecticut Fund for the Environment, released a two-year plan today to protect Long island Sound. Recently the group helped organize a hands-on effort to restore habitat outside of Clinton Harbor. WNPR’s Nancy Cohen reports.

About two dozen scientists and volunteers are weaving strands of a seagrass, known as Eelgrass, in and out of circles of burlap. It looks like green linguini with a rounded tip. Gwen Macdonald of Save the Sound is part of the sewing circle .

“The rhizomes go through the bottom? The roots go through the bottom.  Am I right?”

“You’re fine. The newest roots will come from these nodes right here.”

“OK”

Chris Pickerell from Cornell University Extension harvested these plants from a healthy bed of Eelgrass in Niantic. Divers will plant the woven discs on the seabed near Clinton.  He says 90% of the eelgrass in the Sound has died off. In the 1930s a naturally-occurring mold killed it. Then it was hit by pollution, coastal development and dredging.  Pickerell says it used to be everywhere in Long Island Sound.

“Up and down the coast in every harbor, cove, creek, bay. Everywhere!”

Pickerell has spent the last 18 years developing a method for transplanting Eelgrass. He’s done it successfully at six sites in New York. This is his first try in Connecticut. He says the Sound without eelgrass is like a forest without trees.

"It’s almost like a miniature, underwater jungle because it’s teaming with life. It’s dense with shoots of these plants. You’ve got seahorses, you’ve got young fish,  you’ve got crabs ,you got any number of species that thrive and flourish in this environment.”

For six foot three Kevin Kelly weaving Eelgrass isn’t a natural. But fishing is.

“This is about getting the bottom of the food chain in a richer state.”

Divers from Cornell spent several hours planting the discs of eelgrass on the bottom.  Clinton is the first of three sites where they’ll be growing it.

For WNPR  I‘m Nancy Cohen.