STUART — "The Indian River Lagoon used to be a huge seagrass meadow and over the last few decades it has become more and more mucky and less seagrass," said Krista McCoy, director of research and conservation with the Florida Oceanographic Society.
That was Krista McCoy, the director of research and conservation with the Florida Oceanographic Society. She shared with me some of the struggles of seagrass in the lagoon.
"People have been trying for years to replant the seagrass and many times it dies. And so we struggle as restoration and conservation biologists because we're trying to restore but the system is still sick. The animals and plants aren't going to do well," she said.
The situation may look grim, but researchers are working on solutions. The FOS has been tackling a unique strategy — looking at DNA to strengthen seagrass.
"Having these results has led us to try to figure out what's different between the grasses that die and the grasses that survive in these areas because sometimes we have little sprouts that continue to live after all the other grass dies in the area, and if we know what stresses they're able to survive through then we can intentionally plant them where we know that they'll survive," she said.
Genome sequencing is no simple feat, however. In fact, the FOS is the first in the world to sequence the entire genome of seagrass. Krista compared this to translating a whole book.
"In order to try to understand what genes are associated with a specific response like heat resistance or low salinity resistance, we need to be able to identify that sentence in the book. And so in order to do that, we need to basically translate that whole book. And so that's what genome sequencing is doing. It's basically reading the DNA," she said.
While difficult, the rewards of this research could be astounding, allowing researchers to plant seagrass beds in an ultra-targeted way.
"One of the things that we're hoping to be able to do is really boost our ability to do intentional restoration rather than restoration that's just focused on getting grass out there. And so right now, people are just planting the grass that they have, the grass that they can get from colleagues, and I feel like we're all doing the best that we can. But if we can identify strains of grass that are resilient to specific stressors that we know are in an area — so if you're planting along a very shallow area where the grass is going to get very hot, if you had the choice to just plant random grass or grass that you know has resilience to high temperature, you should plant the ones that are resilient," she said.
It's not just about planting seagrass beds, though. It's about building a library of data that can be used all over.
"So one of the things that I'm interested in is identifying specific genes so that we can start genotyping and finding the resistant grasses. And that's for everybody that has access to grass. It's not just something that we're going to do. Trying to understand the actual stressors that the plants are exposed to in the wild, where those stressors are, and then trying to selectively breed our plants here so that we have plants for restoration projects for these specific stressors. And that kind of brings me to this idea that we're developing here to form basically a living library or a gene bank of living specimens that we have sequenced their genome, and we know what genes they have. We've tested them for resilience to different stressors, and we'll have this bank of different seagrasses. So that's a resource for people so that they can plant in their specific areas," she said.
Shoal grass is one of the most important species to the health of our lagoon. The research that FOS conducted with CD Genomics will go a long way in helping restore the lagoon.