By Swapnali Gole
One long inhale. One long exhale. Not through the nose, but through the mouth. This became a new breathing rhythm for me since the day I grasped a diving regulator in my mouth. With time, I savoured this experience of defying our basic instinct of passing air through the nose. It made me cut out the static noise always lingering in the subconscious mind and focus only on the breath.
Today was yet another field day of breathing through the mouth! It was the summer of April 2022, marked with clear skies and calm seas; a big YES for diving. As I was lost in the pursuit of breathing correctly and avoiding bumping into the sea floor, my gaze shifted to the green pastures around me. Refracted sunrays illuminated the water column, brightening the vibrant green grasses swaying in the water current. I was 4.9 m. underwater, in one of the remotest island groups known – the Nicobar Islands and was there to study the lesser-known greens – the seagrasses, a specialised group of plants perfectly adapted to a marine environment.
A vibrant seagrass meadow gently sways at Nancowry, Central Nicobar. Photo: Dr. Jeyaraj Antony Johnson.
Seagrass meadows are home to many faunal groups, including endangered dugongs and green sea turtles. These ecologically sensitive habitats pump approximately 10 litres of oxygen within 0.0001 ha. and store over 15 per cent of the ocean's total carbon storage. The CAMPA-Dugong Team of the Wildlife Institute of India has discovered 32 new meadows from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands during their seagrass exploratory surveys.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located approximately 700 nautical miles from the mainland Indian coast, harbour 12 seagrass species. In 2017, our team began exploring the shallow coastal waters of the islands to find seagrasses. Not that seagrasses were not studied before, but the geographical vastness and inaccessibility of sites in an insular setup always left room for further discovery. With a chain of more than 800 islands and rocky outcrops, the total coastline of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is about 3,000 km., one of the longest in India. My quest for seagrass exploration took me to the remotest setups and depths in the sea in an attempt to answer just one question: where are seagrasses found?
But before that, it is important to address why we need to know where seagrasses are found. What will we lose if these meadows disappear?
In a classic representation of a marine world, what automatically comes to mind is a vibrantly coloured coral reef, supporting an array of life forms. This kind of beauty lures everyone: prey, predators, and people. Animals swarm in to find food, mates, and retreats. Fishers anticipate their biggest catches in these reefs. Documentary filmmakers aim to capture this throbbing life with fancy night vision cameras.
Alas, an alternative universe conjoined with this charismatic neighbourhood has a less pulsating realm of sand and rubble, but it supports the wonderful world of seagrasses. Barely taller than a few inches, seagrasses constantly pump oxygen into their surroundings and are referred to as the lungs of the sea, thus attracting young fish and a host of invertebrates. With time, these animals move to corals in a never-ending pursuit of life exploration. Survival of the fittest then dictates their fate, enabling them to prosper or get caught by other animals, including humans. Once in the clutches of humans, creatures that began their journey in seagrasses enter a commercial conveyor, designed to provide livelihoods and boost the economies of humans.
Which brings me back to the why, where and what questions I had earlier pondered. We must know where seagrasses are found because they matter beyond our current understanding. Yet, they are being lost at an alarming rate, largely because of threats from us humans. Ironically, their disappearance will trigger a cascade of negative impacts that will affect the circle of life upon which Homo sapiens too is dependent.
My Ph.D. research focused on studying three aspects of seagrass meadows: finding them, understanding the lifeforms dependent on them, and exploring the human dimension of these coastal habitats. After years of struggling with our buoyancies and learning skills to observe and write underwater, we found and studied 66 seagrass meadows along the Andaman and Nicobar coasts. Our findings helped us piece together a hitherto invisible picture, of the seagrass habitats and their lifeforms. The qualitative statement “Seagrasses support many life forms” is generally accompanied by the mention of large, charismatic mega-species fighting extinction, such as sea turtles and especially dugongs, which are wholly dependent on seagrasses as their only feeding grounds.
Not surprisingly, the dugong is the state animal of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Apart from dugongs, we also studied the little-explored life of marine invertebrates, whose survival too is linked to seagrasses. To our surprise we were able to identify as many as 19 different groups of marine invertebrates, each playing specific ecological roles, that end up benefitting the subsistence of local communities in the islands.
As the low tide pulls back the ocean, these invertebrate life forms emerge from their hide-outs. The invertebrate arrival invites men, women, and children to stroll leisurely along the pristine sands on the beach in search of à¤à¥€à¥‘गा (shrimp), केंकड़ा (crabs), िस (bivalve), and all manner of म (fishes) for the evening तरकारी (curry). At times, the fishers are spotted with a rod, poking in rocks and crevices to catch िसयायी म (octopus). Or with a खेवला जाल (cast net) or ताना जाल (shore seine) in hand, to catch bait fishes from the seagrasses for the next day's fishing trip!
A vital part of our work involved establishing whether and to what degree local communities were aware of the importance of seagrass meadows to their livelihoods.
The answer lay in the quiet simplicity of the fishers' humble homes. One of my goals was to document their traditional knowledge of seagrasses. As we searched for insights, conversations unfolded over cups of chai outside fish markets, or on the verandas of beautifully adorned homes, surrounded by stacked fishing nets and swaying areca nut trees. We journeyed to the most remote fishing villages on the islands, learning about samundri ghaas – as seagrasses are locally known – and gathering oral narratives that revealed the community’s deep-rooted perceptions and quiet reverence for these often-overlooked ecosystems.
It turned out that only around 50 per cent of fishers were aware of seagrasses and not many knew their significance to their livelihoods. Sensitising them to the direct relationship between the health of seagrass meadows and their own sustenance, we decided, would be the very first step towards conservation!
The author’s Ph.D. research focused on studying three aspects of seagrass meadows: finding them, understanding the life dependent on them, and exploring the human dimension of these coastal habitats. Photo: Dr. Jeyaraj Antony Johnson.
“हम डोरी-काटा पर मà¥à¥‹à¤‚ खेलता हैं, घास मà¥à¥‹à¤‚ तो बडा म नह िंमलता” (We practice hook and line fishing in corals, not in seagrasses. Seagrass meadows do not have bigger catch), shared a fisher from Swaraj Dweep in Andaman, in a characteristic Hindi dialect of the Islands. Many fishers we interacted with had a similar response when we asked about fishing in seagrass meadows. More than anything else such responses were what pointed us in the direction of sharing with locals the relationship of seagrasses to their livelihoods. In truth, virtually all of them knew more about their ocean world than we who were working for our Ph.D.s did. But it was incumbent on us researchers to share what knowledge we possessed with them, even while we learned from them!
We were able to explain the connection between seagrasses, corals, and humans. I believe they understood that if the seagrasses vanished, the nursery grounds of fish would be gone. That the fish migration from grasses to corals would be affected, thus affecting their catch, livelihood, and revenue.
Those of us who have spent time understanding the ocean, recognise that everything is connected in a giant invisible loop and that if and when even one element of this chain were to disappear, the entire loop was likely to collapse!
Worldwide, seagrass ecosystems are threatened owing to increasing anthropogenic footprints. Some of the attributed causes for seagrass decline are coastal infrastructure development, pollution, nutrient loading, decline in water quality, and physical damage through destructive fishing practices and boat anchorage.
My interactions with the seagrasses and islanders have helped me gain insights into the socio-ecological aspect of these ecosystems. Seagrasses in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are currently recognised as ecologically sensitive habitats under the Island Coastal Regulation Zone (ICRZ–IA) of the Island Protection Zone (IPZ), and partially safeguarded under the Wildlife (Protection) Act (WLPA), 1972. However, less than 20 per cent of meadows are inside the Marine Protected Areas. The remaining 80 per cent, which also form critical dugong habitats, still lie on the geological fault lines of vulnerability and human-influenced fate. Known to have recovered from catastrophes such as the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004) and recurrent cyclones, the islands' seagrasses have proven their resilience to stress. Yet, if persistent, these threats may cause irreversible damage to these fragile coastal habitats.
"We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do." ~ Sylvia Earle.
Swapnali Gole A marine researcher and a National Geographic Explorer, she has been studying dugongs and seagrass ecosystems in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as a part of the CAMPA-Dugong Project of the Wildlife Institute of India. She believes a multi-stakeholder approach is essential in dugong and seagrass conservation.
