by Nikki Wright W


ith a respectful hush, students squat on the sand or sit on logs on the warm beach, listen- ing intently to Trish speaking about the way her indigenous Coast Salish community harvested


herring roe in Deep Bay, B.C., Canada when she was ten. You can hear a fir needle drop in the forest behind her as she recollects her memories of watching the shoreward migrating herring , so thick, she says, they were “like little bits of shin- ing glass in the Bay.” The families would collect the roe from cedar boughs placed in the bay and store it in long storage bins, where she would race past and swipe some to eat before Grandmother would find her out.


These high school students were in a very special site, a Gulf Island on the British Columbia coast, learning first hand the traditional stories of Native peoples harvesting and stor- ing the riches of the sea. During their time on this beach, they would explore eelgrass beds, which are also used for herring spawn sites, in the interface between ocean and land. They found myriad critters crawling and scurrying between the blades. This exploration of the mysteries of sea life so close to the shore would lead them further down the road of revelation and possibly to a lifetime of marine discoveries. Shortly after I had listened to Trish on that extraordinary beach, I accompanied a grade four class on a beach within the boundaries of Victoria on Vancouver Island. With small class groups alongside me, I walked gingerly in gumboots in an eelgrass community at low tide. Once again, I had a glimpse into these wondrous undersea gardens, watching the small kelp crabs and juvenile seastars creep along the emerald green blades, and witnessed small flounder gliding under the sand. A whole world opened up before us. This is the magic of eel- grass in quiet bays and coves and estuaries. SeaChange Marine Conservation Society, a community conservation group on Vancouver Island in British Columbia presents these kinds of opportunities in the spring, summer and fall each year to schools at all levels. Many times, eelgrass (Zostera marina –one of the two native species of eelgrass on the BC coast) is a gateway of learning during our time on the shore and in the estuary. This is the story of my experience with eelgrass as a teacher. The following are suggestions for exploring a seagrass community for Grades 1-6.


When I first started marine naturalist work in Victoria, Canada, I was a SCUBA diver diving for sea creatures and demonstrating their behaviour to elementary and middle students. Most of these young people were more familiar with facts about coral reefs and sharks across the world than with the sea cucumbers, Great Blue Herons and pipefish of their local marine world. This introduction to local sea animals was a first step, but unsatisfying to me as a marine educator. I wanted to teach ecology. I needed to find ways for young people to fall in love with the intricacies of an easily accessible natural system (Capra, 2005). I believed, and do so even more strongly today, that children learn best from the natural world when they are actively engaged in it (Krapfel, 1999). Eelgrass


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has afforded those opportunities through classroom, field and community activities. Students will observe ecological con- nections. The underwater blades offer viewing windows into complex food webs close to shore (Phillips, 1994). Students can extend their understanding of ecological relationships by investigating land use activities affecting these food webs. Teachers can help students understand the importance of citi- zen science in protecting shores with maps of the boundaries of eelgrass meadows made by their students.


The Biological Diversity within Eelgrass Meadows


The matted rhizomes help capture sediment and decreases erosion (Phillips, 1984) which is important for shoreline homeowners. All these benefits of this underwater vegetation can be demonstrated to school children in their classroom and outside on their local beach or estuary. It takes little or lots of time, depending on how far and deeply you as an educator would like to extend the lessons. This article assumes that you have the opportunity to visit your local eelgrass more than once over the school year.


The high


I thought in 1993 I had found a simple way to teach ecological systems to children. Thirteen years later, after all the SCUBA dives, seining, kayaking, tide pooling, and mapping and restoring of eelgrass, I am still entranced with this nearshore plant that makes up underwater emerald forests.


biological diversity available in eelgrass systems provides food for a diver- sity of organisms in several ways. In the Trent River delta on Vancouver Island, for example, 124 species of birds have been identified and includes over 38,000


Eelgrass is a simple enough looking plant, but it has great importance to living systems, both human and non-human. It evolved from fresh water and migrated to the ocean in relatively recent geological time. Eelgrass shoots act like crab grass or strawberry plants in that they grow most success- fully by rhizomes, or underground roots. One plant in a large meadow can be the parent of thousands of shoots, as they clone in muddy sandy substrates in shallow protected bays and estuaries in most temperate marine areas of the world. The intricate weaving of the underwater blades afford shelter for salmon from the hungry foraging of Bald Eagles, and the minute algae on the blades feed the small crustaceans called copepods that swim near the muddy bottom which in turn feed the outcoming salmon fry from freshwater streams. The plants are so popular with salmon that eelgrass meadows have been compared to salmon highways in the Pacific North- west.


Matted rhizomes decrease shore erosion. Matted rhizomes decrease shore erosion


individuals. Forty eight per cent were observed using the in- tertidal eelgrass (Z. japonica) of the delta for feeding, foraging or preening at some time during the year (Harrison and Dunn, 2004).


A network of eelgrass conservationists along the entire coast of British Columbia maps eelgrass beds and locates potential restoration sites. Many of these individuals come into their local schools to help teachers with exploring the mysteries of eelgrass. They bring resource books with plenty of photographs, maps, stories, colouring books, overhead drawings and graphs of food webs found in eelgrass habitats, and eelgrass plants found along the beach. You can provide library books, web sites, stray eelgrass plants and help students explore ideas on how they would like to investigate their local eelgrass beds.


For younger grade levels, it is fun to explore eelgrass meadows for juvenile creatures - small crabs, seastars, and flounder for example. Because the weaving of the eelgrass blades provides good hiding places from predators, the beds are resplendent with new life.


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