Habitat for what, now??

When we talk about eelgrass being an "important habitat for marine life," the usual suspects come to mind first: the fish and the crabs, of course!

And who could blame you? They're economically important, colorful and diverse, fun to catch, and can be surprisingly charismatic.

 

(See the little guy hiding in the folds of a zip tie on our PVC stake?)

But, there are plenty of other critters living in the eelgrass. Tiny invertebrates, including some only a few millimeters in length, live throughout eelgrass beds. They're visible to the naked eye, sure, but you probably wouldn't notice them without looking for them, since they are pretty well camouflaged to escape predation by those fish we love so much...!

(Here's a video I shot of some caprellids, or "skeleton shrimp," with the occasional amphipod swimming by:)

Beyond their purpose as fish food, invertebrate communities serve an important role to the eelgrass plant itself - they eat algae off of the eelgrass blades, allowing sunlight to reach the plant so it can photosynthesize. Some of the yellow blobs you see in the video are eggs from Phyllaplysia taylori, or "Taylor's sea hares." Taylor's sea hares are particularly voracious and QUITE adept at removing algae from eelgrass blades.

 

When we restore eelgrass, we're very careful to not bring along any invertebrate passengers, lest we accidentally introduce a non-native species. Amazingly, these invertebrates usually show up at new eelgrass beds rather quickly. (In our experimental tanks, using a flow-through water system, it took only a few weeks for whole communities of invertebrates to show up on our freshly transplanted eelgrass.)

So, in a sense, "if we build it, they will come." The only trick now is making sure that the eelgrass habitat that we "build" will survive...!