A team of six enthusiastic volunteers lead by members of staff from Restoration Forth and the Marine Conservation Society assembled on Drum Sands to plant some more seagrass seeds this month.
Edinburgh Shoreline members have been involved in seagrass planting and monitoring at this site during the Restoration Forth project and it was great to be back there on a gloriously still and sunny day to get more Zostera Marina seeds into the sands. Walking out, we passed many patches of dwarf eelgrass (Zostera Noltii) which seems to flourish on slightly raised areas of sand.
The seeds had once again been harvested by snorkelers, off the coast of Orkney, and the silicon gun method of injecting them into the sand revealed at low tide was the same as on previous visits. But this time, instead of mixing the seeds into locally collected and sieved silt, Project Seagrass had provided clay powder, which only needed to be mixed with water and was therefore a much quicker way of providing a medium for the seeds. This seed mixture was also denser and so less likely to float straight back to the surface.
On an adjacent site, recently planted, we noticed a lot of bird footprints. I asked if that meant birds had discovered those seagrass seeds and had been undoing all the work by gorging on them. But I was assured that it was more likely that human trampling while planting had raised invertebrates to the surface and that that was what they had been eating.
On the following Monday the Restoration Forth team was embarking on a new trial at Burntisland, using seeds from Burntisland itself, and from the Moray Firth, as well as Orkney. Germination of the Orkney seeds in the Forth has been relatively low so it will be interesting to see if planting seeds from a similar environment (the Moray Firth) and from local plants makes for a higher success rate.
