Virginia's Wild Coast
By Kent Priestly
Photographs by Peter Frank Edwards
Erika Schmitt peels open a plastic freezer bag and pours several pounds of slimy, brownish grains into a metal tray. A puff of rotten egg smell drifts by. “Stinky, right?” she says. “And these are the good ones.”
The grains—roughly 200,000 in all—are the seeds of a plant called eelgrass, and they were harvested nearly six months ago from the shallow lagoons along Virginia’s Atlantic shore. Since then, they’ve undergone something like a vegetal spa treatment: They’ve been agitated, tumbled, bathed in endless changes of water and held for weeks in fiberglass tanks at a comfortable temperature. Now, smell and all, they have an important job to do.
Seated on the bow of a fiberglass work boat, Schmitt, a graduate student at the College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and Bo Lusk, a coastal scientist with The Nature Conservancy, wait for their signal. Around them, the calm surface of Spider Crab Bay stretches away in every direction. Corey Holbert, a researcher from the institute and the boat’s captain, double-checks his GPS and nudges the throttle. “OK, guys, go!” he shouts. As the boat glides forward, Schmitt and Lusk grab handfuls of seeds from the trays and fling them across the water.
The seeds pepper the bay’s surface and disappear below. This work is an act of faith. The seeds will sink to the bottom, lodge in the sand and, the theory holds, begin germinating once the water temperature dips into the 50s. But it won’t be clear until next spring whether all the care Schmitt, Lusk and many others have lavished on these seeds has paid off in the form of green, growing shoots.
A little more than a decade ago, there was no eelgrass to speak of in these bays. There hadn’t been since the early 1930s, when a deadly wasting disease struck the lush underwater meadows that once served as the foundation for aquatic life. Around the same time, a devastating hurricane finished off any remaining eelgrass. The plants’ demise had profound effects: Fish lost their foraging grounds, and waterfowl were forced to fly elsewhere in search of food.
Today, the eelgrass’s revival is only the latest in a series of restoration projects under way at the Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve, a chain of barrier islands that spans more than a third of Virginia’s coast. The reserve’s undeveloped shores feel a world away from the dense beach communities of the Mid-Atlantic—towns built on shifting sandbars, where roads, boardwalks and waterfront houses need constant defense against shoreline erosion, hurricanes and rising sea levels. But as scientists at the reserve work to restore its islands and bays, they are refining techniques that may also help restore coastal areas far less wild. ...
http://magazine.nature.org/features/virginias-wild-coast.xml
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