Can you “sea” grass? Tell Cooloola Coastcare!

Can you “sea” grass? Coastcare would like to know where.

Cooloola Coastcare is seeking locals who get out on the water in Tin Can Inlet to help find existing seagrass beds.

If you have knowledge of or photos of seagrass at any depth including in the intertidal zone or in deep water, we’d love to hear from you. If you can give a good description of the area with landmarks, or even better still, a GPS location, that would be very useful.

We are seeking to identify seagrass locations after recent field observations using underwater cameras indicated the worrying absence of seagrass, the building block of the food web in our marine environment and vital food source for dugongs and turtles.

Send your sighting information or photos to: president@cooloolacoastcare.org.au

Please include the date of the sighting, your best description of the location to help our fieldworkers find it again, and a GPS location if you have it. Any photos of the general location are helpful as well as underwater photos if you have them.

Coastcare will use your recon photos or descriptions to help narrow the search areas and will target these areas for further research. Coastcare volunteers can then further investigate using both our underwater cameras on our seagrass sled and our new underwater drone, a remotely operated underwater vehicle funded by Gympie Regional Council Community Grant for the Environment.

This hunt for seagrass and continuing research into the state of seagrass and underwater biodiversity is part of an ongoing project to try to rehabilitate Tin Can Inlet that began in 2017.

Find out more on the project website at https://www.cooloolacoastcare.org.au/projects/tin-can-inlet-rehabilitation

Cooloola Coastcare