Sydney's Bald Reef Gets a Seaweed Transplant

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http://www.livescience.com/42640-seaweed-transplant-australia-reef.html

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Phyllospora comosa seaweed is transplanted by a team member back onto a reef in Sydney from where it vanished decades ago. The transplanted seaweed has survived and reproduced.
Credit: UNSW

Seaweed transplants could help revive an underwater forest off the coast of Sydney, Australia, that was wiped out by sewage dumping decades earlier, a new study suggests.

The large brown seaweed species Phyllospora comosa, commonly called crayweed, once thrived off the city's shores, providing food and shelter for other undersea creatures like fish and abalone. But in 2008, researchers discovered that this macroalgae had disappeared from a 43-mile (70 kilometers) stretch of Sydney's coastline — and that it had probably been missing for years.

The embryos of Phyllospora are quite vulnerable to pollutants commonly found in sewage, the scientists noted in their study, published Jan. 8 in the journal PLOS ONE. During the 1970s and 1980s, a high volume of Sydney's sewage was pumped into the water close to shore. Even though the city introduced new systems in the 1990s to pump sewage into the deeper ocean, crayweed had not grown back in the area since then.

A group of ecologists took fertile crayweed from surrounding coastal areas and transplanted the species onto two barren reef sites off Sydney. At one site off Long Bay, transplanted crayweed individuals survived just well as those left undisturbed, and they even reproduced. Crayweed at the other site off Cape Banks did not fare as well: The specimens had lower survival rates and were in poorer condition than the controls.