(birds squawking) (birds continues squawking) - [Narrator] Rhode Island, known by many as the ocean state, may be the smallest state in the US, but its waters tell stories deeper than most.

Along its coastline, the state contains bountiful shoreline and marine ecosystems that are integral to the New England region.

From the rich salt marshes that harbor hunting ground for wading birds and other animals to rocky shores where the rigid coastline provides habitat for countless species of aquatic animals, Rhode Island and its surrounding coastline provide habitat for a vast array of marine life, mammals, fish, and other countless creatures that call the ocean home.

(soft music) If one dives below the surface, you can encounter one of the most important underwater environments in the world, seagrass meadows.

Seagrass meadows and other shoreline habitats are the epicenter for inshore activity within New England's Oceanic ecosystems.

They provide habitat for thousands of fish, crustaceans, and mammals.

These are New England's underwater nurseries.

These are the secrets of seagrass.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (gentle music) (water bubbling) - [Narrator] With over 384 miles of coastline, it's no wonder why Rhode Island is referred to as the Ocean State.

During the last ice age, massive glaciers repeatedly moved through and retreated from what is now Rhode Island.

This glacial activity created the state's distinct land forms such as its rocky coastlines, islands, and ponds.

Today, what makes Southern New England's coastal habitat truly special is its nurseries and inshore habitat.

- Rhode Island's inshore habitats are extremely unique.

Every single one of themú has unique animals that have evolved and adapted over eons to live specifically within these habitats.

Even when you look from state to state, within New England and along our coastline of North America and within these ecosystems, there's a collection of habitats that make up this ecosystem.

One of the most vital ones are our seagrass beds.

- [Narrator] Seagrasses appear sporadically along the state's coastline, and the primary species is Zostera marina, better known as eelgrass.

These aquatic plants provide major ecological benefits for their environments that help both aquatic and terrestrial habitats.

Eelgrass can buffer larger waves before they reach the shoreline, trap organic particles, and create a carbon sink while also taking in CO2 and releasing oxygen into the water.

One of the most visual benefits is providing habitat for a wide variety of fish species.

- Eelgrass is a really important habitat for nurseries for our larger fisheries.

So a lot of young fish, eggs are deposited.

They grow up in those meadows, and those meadows really provide important structure and protection for those juvenile species as they grow out to larger sizes and then disperse out into the wide erosion.

- [Narrator] American eel dwell in these grasses and hide in the thickets from predators as they make their way up and down the estuaries to spawn in the ocean.

With long, slender bodies, eels can vanish among the blades and slip easily through even the densest stands.

(gentle music) Their movement sends rippling waves down their length, and they can even swim in reverse.

(gentle music continues) One of the predators eels hide from is the striped bass.

These powerful fish are voracious hunters and eelgrass gives the eels a crucial place to disappear.

But eels aren't the only ones on the menu.

Baitfish like silversides and killifish also flee into eel grass to escape striped bass.

(gentle music continues) These schools hug shallow shorelines and inshore waters.

And in Rhode Island, the heart of those environments is Narragansett Bay, a 25 mile long estuary home to thousands of species.

- Narragansett Bay, being an estuary is an extremely productive habitat, extremely dense with life, and that life in the bay starts off tectonically for the most part, and these small forms of life rely on specific habitats to find food and protection from larger predators, open ocean currents, things like that.

- [Narrator] Chris Dodge, the Narragansett Bay keeper for Save the Bay spends much of his field work time around seagrass, monitoring the water quality and environmental health of the area.

One of the activities he does is seining, sampling Eelgrass Meadows to catch different species that utilize the eelgrass beds.

To do this, Chris Embarks from Save the Bay Headquarters to go to one of his favorite seining hotspots.

(gentle music) - So today we are headed out on my Waterkeeper vessel.

We've departed Providence, Rhode Island and headed south towards Prudence Island, spot called T Wharf.

And that is a place where there is a known stand of eelgrass still remaining in Narragansett Bay.

There's so few stands of eelgrass left in Rhode Island waters that anytime we see them in a place, it's just really unique to know that the water quality there still allows for this really fragile plant to still exist and then also support the habitat.

(soft music) What we've decided to do is head down with a net called the sein net.

It's a good method of biological sampling that we're gonna walk out into the water with and try and see if we can sample just along the edge of the eelgrass bed so we're not walking right in it.

- [Narrator] To sein properly, Chris and the Save the Bay team need to be careful and methodical in their approach.

By going slowly, they avoid scaring or injuring animals amongst the eelgrass.

- Yeah, so lots of species throughout Narraganset Bay and Rhode Island waters and all up and down the East Coast really love eelgrass beds.

They provide a lot of food and shelter for these animals, especially some of the more fragile species or species that find themselves a little more fragile during certain parts of their lives.

Lift this net up.

All right, bring it right up here to the edge of the water.

We're gonna lay it down.

All right, definitely got a nice big bay scallop here.

European green crab.

All of these flopping around in front of us here, the fish that we caught the most of are the Atlantic silverside, Menidia menidia.

They do not tolerate a lot of really poor environmental conditions, low oxygen and things like that.

They're usually one of the first to go, so when we see 'em around, it's a good sign.

Oh, we got a little pipefish.

Nice.

- [Narrator] Chris has caught a northern pipefish, a slender fish in the same family as seahorses.

This species is common in Rhode Island waters, particularly seagrass beds.

Their comically shaped mouth is perfect for feeding on small invertebrates and other small prey.

Another species caught in the net is the bay scallop, a bivalve native to much of the northeast.

- Scallops are almost obligate, resides in eelgrass beds.

So when they reproduce every kind of late spring, early summer and additionally, kind of late fall here in Rhode Island, they broadcast spawn and then that larval scallop will look for bits of eelgrass to attach itself to for the next portion of its lifetime.

(soft music) - [Narrator] With their blue eyes, scallops are easily recognizable.

(soft music continues) Undisturbed, they could be found filter feeding on plankton, algae, and other small organic matter.

To move or escape from predators, scallops have a trademark method.

They rapidly clapped their shells together, forcing a jet of water out from a hinge area, sending the scallop flying through the water.

(soft music continues) Unfortunately, for both scallops and recreational shell fishermen and women, scallop populations have experienced a sharp decline since the 1980s and have not fully recovered.

This is due to a variety of factors, most notably the decline of eelgrass populations.

- In places where we historically had a very active bay scallop fishery, now that we're beginning to lose eelgrass in a lot of our coastal estuaries, those bay scallops are also disappearing with it.

And when you lose eelgrass meadows, you lose a very important part of that ecosystem and it cascades through other different organisms that live in our marine systems.

- [Narrator] Heather Kinney, a coastal restoration program manager with the Nature Conservancy, helps monitor scallop populations in different pressured areas around Rhode Island, even in cold temperatures.

- Today, we're going to catch some bay gallops.

We're gonna check on their condition and how they're doing in the pond, hopefully get a couple of your classes, some small ones and some big ones.

There's this really strong correlation between bay scallop survival and the denseness of a seagrass bed.

They provide a really good environment for food to get kind of caught because bay scallops are a filter feeder, and so they're looking for a pretty specific plankton in the water that they're going to eat.

- [Narrator] The area Heather is diving now used to have prevalent eelgrass beds.

The scallops are now being forced to attach to different structures from a young age.

And now with much of the sea floor barren, only scattered structures remain for the organisms that still live there.

- The seagrass in this area used to be much more prominent, but due to pressure from a lot of boating action, overfishing and then also waste water cause a lot of water clarity issues.

And if there's not light going into the water, then the grasses can grow.

Okay.

They've got all sorts of cool stuff, but they've got these really cool eyes, about 40 eyes that go right around the mantle.

So those eyes are mostly for seeing light and shadow, so as things pass, they can kind of close up and protect themselves.

So around the 1970s, there was still a pretty good scallop fishery in Rhode Island.

A number of different things happened that caused their decline, including disease, which was not just affecting scallops from like harmful algal blooms, but also disease affecting seagrass beds.

- [Narrator] Seagrasses face pressure from a variety of factors, many of which are caused by humans, a significant one being excess nutrients in the water caused by rain runoff from fertilizer in our lawns.

- Eelgrass is threatened today.

It's threatened on the same scale as coral reefs and tropical rainforest.

Primary threats against eelgrass are eutrophication, that's too many nutrients that are getting into our coastal estuaries.

It allows macro algae and phytoplankton or small algae in the water to proliferate.

And what they do is that then blocks light from getting to the eelgrass as that grow on the bottom in the sediment.

Here on the northeast coast of the US, we've lost about 50% of our eelgrass habitats.

- [Narrator] Eelgrass beds under stress appear fragmented and can be covered with algae, which can undermine their ecosystem structure and function.

The seagrasses off the mainland have slowly recovered due to extensive work by surrounding environmental organizations to improve water quality and bring the meadows back to the coastline.

But there is still much more work to do.

One of the integral seagrass restoration studies comes from a world leader in ocean science, technology and research.

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution cover a broad range of marine research topics for New England and beyond, one of which is eelgrass restoration.

Dr.

Matt Long's machine lab leads WHOI's Eelgrass projects and works to bring back eelgrass on a regional scale.

- What we're studying here at Woods Hole Oceanographic is to better understand the metabolism and the primary production of our coastal eelgrass meadows.

Figure out how to restore these meadows actively that we've lost in the past.

And a lot of that has to do with addressing the underlying issues of too many nutrients in our system, harmful algal blooms, and other ways to improve the ecosystems for eelgrass.

We're also focused on growing eelgrass in the lab from seeds and then planting them out in locations and on structures that can actively restore eelgrass beds and return them to the areas they've been removed from.

- So in this tank, here we're germinating seeds that we collected from the field this past summer in the hopes of growing them to a healthy, robust size, and then later out planting them on floating platforms locally around New England.

Here are some eelgrass seeds.

You can see they're very small, and now unlike kelp and seaweed, eelgrass are actual plants, meaning they produce seeds and flowers, and we collect several hundred of these guys and then plant them in coastal sediment in that tank over there where they will hopefully germinate over the course of the winter and grow into the healthy big eelgrass plants by next summer.

And now, this could be really important for the future of New England eelgrass meadows, which have taken a major hit in the past 50 years.

'cause if we can restore them, we can help preserve our local fisheries, our coastlines, and the health of our waterways.

(soft music) So in here we have a lot of our larger eelgrass plants that we've been growing over the past eight months.

You can see them in these trays here, and these guys are gonna keep getting bigger, and then we'll outplant them probably this next year in areas where eelgrass has previously been excluded from the environment.

So here we have an eight month old eelgrass shoot that we've grown here at WHOI, and now it actually doesn't look too dissimilar from the grass you might find on your front lawn.

You have three or four blades here, which are the leaves, and then underneath the sediment surface you have your root structure, which helps to connect all the different shoots of an eelgrass meadow together into a vast network.

Everything I've shown you here today is a part of WHOI's efforts to restore eelgrass meadows and ensure the long-term health of our vital coastal ecosystems here in New England.

- [Narrator] But what would these seagrass patches look like before the dieback events?

Miles off the coast of mainland Rhode Island lies a place where we can get hints of what these eelgrass beds should look like.

Named one of the 12 last great places in the Western Hemisphere by the Nature Conservancy, Block Island is a remnant of a glacial terminal end moraine.

It offers unique and diverse habitats from its famous bluffs, to dune habitats, to its white sand beaches.

There's much to explore in this environmental haven.

- So when most people think of New England or even New England coastlines, they really just think of like rocky, pretty gray, nothing compared to the pristine, clear waters of down in the Gulf or down in more tropical ecosystems or environments.

But 13 miles off of mainland Rhode Island, and this pork shop shaped island right here is Block Island, which is really an oceanic paradise.

We have so much life that a lot of people don't get to see or don't even know is actually out here.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Off the island's beaches where sandy bottom is present is an underwater landscape fewer aware of in New England.

These eelgrass meadows are extraordinarily healthy.

Peering into these environments is like traveling through time.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) These eelgrass meadows are tall, lush, and cover many areas along Block Island's inshore habitats.

Healthy seagrasses mean healthy environments, and this underwater haven supports fish species endemic to the region.

(gentle music continues) Fish are not the only type of animal found in these habitats.

Poking through the eelgrass blades are a pair of antennae belonging to one of the most recognizable crustaceans in the world.

The American lobster.

Once common throughout all of New England, it has faced significant pressure like changing climate and shell disease, yet it can still be readily found in these types of habitats.

Given there is little structure nearby.

this rare Blue Lobster uses the seagrass as a hiding spot.

The eelgrass blades help conceal its carapace as it looks for shelter.

Eventually, it finds a divot in the seagrass bed, perfect to crawl under.

It's important that it has because something else that may enjoy the lobster as a snack also utilizes these waters.

Gray seals, one of New England's most common species of marine mammal, have made a comeback on Block Island.

The population size is increasing rapidly, and many of these seals spend time hunting in the shallows.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Throughout the season, the seals can be seen moving through the meadows as they socialize and search for prey, their flexible bodies swimming gracefully between the eelgrass.

- We have lots of seagrass offshore of Block Island, which is home to lots of shellfish, crustaceans.

These are all prey items that seals might eat.

Seals are opportunistic feeders, so they're gonna be looking for anything that they can find to eat in front of them, and they're not gonna necessarily target a specific species.

The whole ecosystem is like a domino effect.

If the seagrass is depleted, then that's gonna affect all other different species all the way up to the seal populations.

(gentle music continues) - [Narrator] But we have much more to show you when it comes to the seals.

For that, be sure to tune into the next episode of "Ocean State" Rhode Island's Wild Coast".

(waves lapping) - [Narrator] From seals to scallops, the seagrass meadows throughout New England are another reminder of how organisms all rely on the health of an ecosystem.

All of our environments are connected together.

These ecosystems, many of which are supported by eelgrass, either directly or indirectly, are integral for the North Atlantic as a whole.

Seagrass meadows are nurseries, a place that everyone should look to protect.

Just like the environmental groups right here in Rhode Island and the surrounding area, we can all help prevent seagrass die off through small acts of kindness toward nature, like watching what we put on our lawns.

Through these actions, we can protect New England's oceanic nurseries and continue to conserve and share the secrets of the seagrass.

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