Archive: 2002

Keep our marine life out of strife!

Coastcare Media Release, 2 December 2002

Australian marine experts and Coastcare Week ambassadors, Ron and Valerie Taylor, today urged all Queenslanders to protect the habitat of dugong or risk losing them forever! The Taylors have issued the call as part of Coastcare Week (1 -7 December), which is drawing attention to the plight of Australia's threatened and vulnerable marine species in a new campaign - 'The Coast is our Home'.

"The tropical dugong is the only fully herbivorous marine mammal and the only Sirenian (sea cow) to occur in Australia. It is extinct or near extinct in most of its former range which extended from East Africa to South-east Asia and the western Pacific," said Ms Taylor. "The dugong survives solely on seagrasses and may become extinct if the seagrass dies off. At one time dugong were very common in Queensland waters, but due to a range of pressures, population numbers have quickly declined and they are now listed as vulnerable to extinction.

"Accidental entanglement in fishing and shark net, injuries caused by boat strikes and loss of valuable seagrasses, have resulted in a decline in dugong numbers in Queensland," she said. Seagrass meadows can be destroyed by direct disturbances like dredging, or indirectly, through deterioration in water quality. Farming, gardening and household wastewater add soil, silt nutrients and pollutants to rivers and stormwater.

The multiple stresses from coastal development and urban and agricultural run-off also reduce the resilience of seagrasses to other natural impacts such as storms or floods. The 1992 Mary River flood smothered vast seagrass beds in Hervey Bay, and over 100 dugong starved to death and about 1000 were displaced.

Ron Taylor said there are numerous things people can do to protect and conserve dugong. "Sometimes there isn't much we can do about mother nature, however boaters can help protect dugong by not travelling fast over seagrass meadows as this increases the chance of striking a dugong.

The Seagrass-Watch program, established in 1998 as an initiative of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, involves local community groups in mapping and monitoring seagrass habitats vital for fisheries, turtles and dugongs.

Seagrass-Watch programs have been established in Hervey Bay, the Whitsundays, Townsville and Cairns, and more recently in the Moreton Bay Marine Park to provide an important early warning of changes to seagrass habitat in each region.

Mapping of seagrass communities by trained community volunteers and seagrass researchers resulted in the successful mapping of 22% of the sites in a detailed baseline survey of Hervey Bay and Great Sandy Straits region in December 1998.

Long-term monitoring sites, including areas of high impacts and 'control' sites, have been established at over forty locations throughout Queensland. These sites are monitored by over 300 volunteers.

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Sailing club helps out with seagrass program

By Tony Fontes, Diving the Whitsundays, Whitsunday Times, 2002

The Whitsunday Sailing Club recently helped OUCH volunteers to continue with their Cid Harbour seagrass monitoring project after the group was unsuccessful in obtaining much needed Coastcare funding.

The funding was needed to charter a boat to make the quarterly trip to Whitsunday Island in order for volunteers to continue surveys of the seagrass beds to the north of the island.

With no funds to continue the project, it seemed that after one and a half years of data collection the project would have to wind up.

The Seagrass Watch Program is an initiative of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries Marine Plant Ecology Group, which involves trained local volunteers collecting data on the health of the seagrass beds in their local area four times per year.

The data is then sent to the DPI where it is entered into a database.

The monitoring aims to provide early warning of any unusual changes in the seagrass cover, which may indicate human impacts.

The database will also provide long-term information on the natural seasonal changes in the seagrass meadows, helping scientists to better focus their studies.

Tropical seagrass beds are an important resource, acting as productive nurseries for many important commercial fish and prawn species, as well as providing food for vulnerable species such as turtle and dugong.

Despite their importance there are large gaps in the scientific knowledge of tropical seagrass growth and reproduction.

In the Whitsundays, the volunteers monitor a variety of mainland and island sites and the importance of the Cid Harbour site is that it is a reference site for all the others monitored by the Whitsunday Volunteers and OUCH in the region.

The remote location of the site means that it is relatively unaffected by influences from development on the mainland and can act as a benchmark for all of the other sites.

At the last moment the Whitsunday Sailing Club came to the rescue with an offer to loan its 'Rescue l' boat to the OUCH volunteers, which allowed the monitoring to be done on time last Sunday.

Four volunteers made the trip to monitor the health of the Cid Harbour seagrass meadow, one of the most extensive in the area.

Photo: OUCH and Seagrass-Watch members in action.

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