This is the commonest seagrass on this coast, and seagrass meadows do three jobs that nothing else does as well.
They are nurseries. A large share of the fish that end up on the reef spend their first months in seagrass, where the blades break up sightlines and small animals can grow without being seen. They are the only food of the dugong and a staple of the green turtle, both of which are here because the meadows are. And they lock up carbon: a hectare of seagrass buries it faster than a hectare of rainforest and holds it in the sediment for thousands of years, because the roots keep growing upward into what they have already buried.
The pollination is worth knowing about too. Seagrass pollen drifts in the water, and it was shown in 2016 that small crustaceans moving between flowers also carry it, which is animal pollination in the sea, done by animals nobody had thought to watch.
All of this is easy to overlook. Meadows look like an empty green field, they get anchored in, dredged and built over, and they are disappearing worldwide faster than coral reefs. Almost no diver books a boat to see one.
- flat ribbon leaves with finely serrated tips, growing straight from the sediment
- no woody stem, unlike the sickle-leaved seagrass
- forms the widest meadows on this coast
- leaves up to 15 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
