Econews

The note snapped above is about the seagrass around Ryde Pier and was snapped from Wightlife, a freebie dished out by the Wight Link ferry people. Available online at reference 1.

It seems that seagrass, which grows in shallow waters around the world, is eco-important but is under threat for various reasons, most of them human. And fragile at Ryde because shallow is good because the light is good, but shallow is also bad because the water might retreat altogether at low tide, leaving the seagrass high and dry. So the seagrass there has to strike the best bargain with the sand that it can. 

Seagrass attracts a substantial article in Wikipedia at reference 2, which claims, inter alia, that the modest seagrass captures more carbon to the hectare than tropical rain forest. Which seems a bit unlikely, but I have not yet got around to checking.

Nevertheless, it is good news that the seagrass meadows at Ryde are thriving.

But not to be confused with the also eco-important kelp of reference 3, which, despite its impressive appearance is really a form of brown algae, whereas the much more modest seagrass is a flowering plant, an altogether more advanced branch of creation. And the only flowering plant to have made the move from on the land to under the water. A long time, as it happens, before we arrived on the scene.

PS 1: another sort of fragility was brought to me yesterday by Microsoft News, from the Daily Telegraph. Fragile cliffs brought down by heavy rain on that other Jurassic coast, further down the coast from the Isle of Wight. More precisely, at Seatown, aka Broadchurch. I wonder whether the cliffs noticed in the second part of reference 4 are similarly vulnerable - although as far as I can make out from my BGS map of the island, these red rather than brown cliffs are Lower Cretaceous rather than Jurassic, which last strata do not surface at all. On the other hand, they are always finding dinosaurs in the vicinity.

PS 2: and while we are on the Telegraph, I am reminded that one of their journalists, one Alison Pearson, is every bit as irritating as their Charles Moore. A newspaper only bought, I may say, because the village shop in Brading had run out of Guardians. I had forgotten how bad it has become, very much down there with the 'Daily Mail'.

References

Reference 1: https://www.wightlink.co.uk/wightlife. Now on Issue 3, 2023. This item was from Issue 2.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagrass.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/forests-at-sea.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-crane-report.html.