Thousands of prairies and lush green stalks underwater flowing in shallow waters, from the tropics to the Arctic Circle, on the shores of the world: sea grasslands. Their thickening of leaves and root balls is a unique ecosystem in which micro-algae float like powerful mannets. Lemon-yellow sea horses cling to their prehensile tails and suck in flea crabs, grazing small snails on the algae growth next to them. The mini starfish slowly makes its way onto the small suction legs, which are surrounded by small transparent lakes.
In the thick leaf mat of the sea grasslands, many sea creatures find shelter, seats, hiding places and food. Underwater grasslands are also engineered by their environment: they trap sediment, reduce flow speed, slow erosion and produce oxygen. Without seaweed, the underwater and upstream coasts would look dramatically different. Now the Mediterranean marine ecosystem and all their inhabitants are particularly threatened.
Endangered plains of Poseidon
Seagrasses rarely bloom, they often do not undergo sexual reproduction. Most of the time they breed through horizontal root shoots, namely genetically identical clones. Such stocks grow slowly, but can be very large and very old – in the Mediterranean Sea they can sometimes reach an area of more than 15 kilometers and Are 80,000 years old! The grass of the underwater meadows is not vegetative at all: 16 generations of seaweed belong to a different family, with many of their species. Two to six narrow, long leaves from each plant grow towards the sunlight at the sea surface. At the bottom, they anchor themselves firmly in the sandy ground with sandy plains and branching roots and turn these roots into discs that stick to rocky surfaces.
- With their tangled roots, they stabilize soft seabeds and act as breakwaters to protect erosion from erosion,
- They take a lot of CO2 And give oxygen,
- They provide shelter for many species as nurseries for fish and other marine animals, including important food resources for humans,
- They filter sediment particles and other suspended substances from water and improve water quality, and
- They get stuck in the microplastic and sometimes roll it back to the ground.
Because it grows slowly, seaweed may not adapt quickly to new environmental conditions. In addition, clone communities have low genetic variability, in which a plant reacts like any other disturbance, such as temperature or salinity fluctuations. Clone warming is making it difficult to cope with clone warming: in the western Mediterranean, they sprouted after two heat waves and as a result of the rise in temperature Quite slow overall – and especially seaweed that only occurs in the Mediterranean Sea Posidonia Reacts particularly sensitive.
© Damocean / Getty Images / iStock (Detail)
Neptune Grass on the coast of Catalonia
There, there is also a risk of mechanical damage to the sea grasslands, on the banks heavily used by tourists. Due to illegal anchor. Slow-growing frog-spoon plants cannot compensate for the resulting catastrophe. At the same time, they are facing increasingly strong competition from aggressive large algae migrating from the Red Sea through the Suez Canal – they grow faster and tolerate heat better.
The seafarers filter the plastic from the sea and bring it back to land
Gradual disappearance of seaweed is likely to result. Maybe even the ones you couldn’t think of before. An example is plastic pollution, a major problem on the Spanish Mediterranean coast and around the Balearic Islands. In the Spanish region of Almeria, it has been growing since the 1970s, when industrial cultivation of fruits and vegetables began under plastic wrap: UV radiation and wind disintegrated large area films, shaking them and moving them across the landscape. Blew through. The plastic pieces are disintegrated into smaller and smaller pieces and eventually end up in the ocean with wind, rain, or water springs; Contains several particles less than five millimeters in size: microplastic.
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