[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hether we are fishermen, divers, paddlers, or boaters we all benefit from the use of the marine environment. Many of us may have taken steps to reduce our impact on the sea by ensuring that we follow fishing regulations or by using eco-friendly cleaning products on our boats. However, have you ever thought about the connection between ocean and dry land? How do our actions on land affect the health of the sea? And vice versa?
Approximately half of the world’s population (including the entire Bahamas) lives within 200 kilometres of the coast. We rely heavily on the coastal zone for livelihoods, entertainment, and other resources, and in turn place a lot of pressure on the balance of those ecosystems. Ensuring that our land and sea-based ecosystems remain healthy, and connected, is vital to the sustainability of our environment.
Here are some examples.
Sea turtles. They are globally endangered and iconic marine animals. Sea turtles are long-lived and take a long time to mature, so any great loss to their populations would be hard to recover. Depending on their diet, sea turtles may help to control jellyfish populations, or they may act as landscapers of the sea by trimming seagrass beds. They nest on sandy beaches during summer full moons, and any unhatched eggs fertilize beach vegetation which helps strengthen dune systems that protect human populations from storm surge.
Seaweed. Sargassum and other algae provide habitat to animals such as crabs and juvenile fish and turtles. Floating sargassum provides protective “islands” in the open ocean where animals can find no other shelter. When sargassum drifts ashore it brings food for land-based birds and other animals, and provides additional nutrients to ecosystems where they are otherwise limited. Seaweed that is on the beach and becomes covered with windblown sand also helps to stabilize and strengthen the dune system. These are several of the reasons why it is harmful to remove seaweed from beaches.
Land crabs. To some, dinner, to others, a garden nuisance. Did you know that land crabs spend the earliest stage of their lives in the ocean? Egg-bearing female crabs migrate to the sea to send their eggs off on a 40 day journey of metamorphosis as plankton. At this stage they are a food source for juvenile fish such as bonefish and grunts. Once they grow legs and claws they return to wetland areas and move onto land where they begin eating decaying plant material, flowers, berries, and insects, helping to keep our land healthy.
Grunts. Not only are they tasty, but they provide an important function for the marine environment. Grunts spend most of their daylight hours schooled up, hanging around a coral head, but at night their behavior gets increasingly interesting as they head out individually to nearby seagrass beds to search for food. They all return to their coral head by dawn and digest and subsequently excrete nutrients from the food they found in the seagrass bed. In this way, grunts move nutrients from seagrass beds to coral reefs where they are needed to help coral grow! Coral heads with resident schools of grunts have been shown to grow a lot faster than coral heads without grunts. Corals in turn provide shelter for about 25% of all marine life and help build up reefs which protect our shorelines, though they only cover about 1% of Earth’s sea floor.
So give your environment some credit, it’s working hard to keep our planet healthy. Do your part by participating in eco-friendly behavior on land and sea. A great option is to participate in the Ocean Conservancy’s (oceanconservancy.org) International Coastal Cleanup in September. Visit their website to find a cleanup near you! Contact Friends of the Environment if you would like to participate in an Abaco-based cleanup.
Friends of the Environment is a non-profit environmental organizations devoted to preserving Abaco’s fragile environment and working towards a more sustainable future. For more information, visit www.friendsoftheenvironment.org, call (242) 367-2721 or email info@friendsoftheenvironment.org.