Could Seagrass be a solution to climate change?

Last July, I dived with a team from the Manx Wildlife Trust - and filmed a short documentary - on the Isle of Man's first transplanting of a seagrass meadow.

Seagrass meadows are essential ecosystems for biodiversity and contribution towards climate change mitigation. Despite covering less than 0.1% of our oceans, they can sequester up to 10% of the ocean's CO2.

The Isle of Man currently has no known seagrass meadows on the west side. Although historically had two seagrass meadows just off a touristy beach, there is no known evidence of any such seagrass meadows any longer. Perhaps these meadows died as a result of some change to their environment.

So, following the latest best practice and led by the Manx Wildlife Trusts' resident Marine Biologist - we transplanted some healthy specimen plants from an established meadow on the other side of the island and transplanted these plants to one of the previously known locations where Seagrass used to be in the past.

This video was a lot of fun to film in just one day!

I also filmed a 360 'VR style' video from the donor site - you can look all around in 360 degrees in a high 4K resolution:

If you enjoyed these videos, please do me a massive favour and hit the 'like' button on YouTube. This helps tell the YouTube algorithm to recommend the video to others! Thank you so much :)

I did revisit the new seagrass meadow three months after transplantation and can report that approximately 10-15% of the plants seem to have perished. Although that's the bad news, the good news is that 85-90% of the plants are thriving!

There will be an exciting update about a new Seagrass project on the Isle of Man that I am involved with – but I'll save this for a future update ;).