welcome to the science for the public lecture series the science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public this is our website for our program  contribution to both marine botany and marine ecology especially at this time of environmental stress his focus is on evolutionary and ecological forces that affect marine biodiversity dr who uses the most sophisticated analytic methods so as to guide conservation decisions at both the local and global scales despite the critical role of sea grasses we in the general public do not hear much about them so tonight we are in for some surprises we learn why sea grasses are indispensable in marine ecosystems and we learn also how development pollution and climate change are affecting se grasses and the many organisms that depend on them and finally we learn what dr dollar and other scientists in this field are trying to do to revive and conserve sea grasses we are really delighted to who welcome sir thank you very much you've done and we really appreciate your coming by and helping us out with this topic which we bound to hear a great deal more we don't get information about sea grasses and so immediately we in the general public think seaweed so could you give us a little background what's the difference if there is we mixed up all right thank you very much very specific areas and nowhere else in the wall so example is one that you find in how why which is the hello feel how anna and another also found on the east coast of north america which is in ecosystems right so it's interesting to know that in the mire in environment at least there are two major groups of flowering plants that are found within the marin environment so one is so much inside marine environment and so the distribution is it's fine across the costa regions but then mostly the higher richness of species  north east and part of north america i see so the diversity itself is there really mixed around the world i think pointed out there are some that just khloe themselves and others that we produce sexually and could you give us a little information about that and so like other t area dominated by just one and sometimes in that case it's usually like reproduction happening there and so there are many ways to explain why you have diversity in the eastern part of the region of the world versus the western part of the world so first the diversity of animals that depend on sea grass is also moved from the east to the west so for example sea grasses are very important in the diet of many marine animals so the se so the ones that depend indirectly on secrecies can be fish and some other inverts of great so most of them rely on sea grasses for laying their eggs and they use the sea grass beds as attachment substrate on the leaves of sea grasses as a result they help to purify the water and and so those are some of the roles they play in the eco system couldn't just get something straight and a little more here that you see that they are great carbon sequestration so can you give me any idea of like how much i've seen that they produce a huge amount of oxygen for the sea and they pull out a large amount of c o two so is that really that significant right yes so that's one of the  around the cost or regions of the wall and i long the cost all regions of the world that's where you find also lots of human population lives around the coastal regions so as a result there is so much pollution so much and the organisms that are at the receiving end because they are primary producers they have to take up all this excess chemicals and waste that has been released as a result of human activities and it take them but then one thing is food chain so within the food chain plans are usually at the beginning of the food chain the primary produce so organisms that depend on the but the other is is this pollution from development and so on the puts so much agriculture put so much contamination in the water is is that a contributing factor to the loss of the they're just there in the background doing you know if ignored the fact that they are actually at the beginning of the food chain and anything that happens to see grasses will have a cascading effect on all the other does which destroy a cause of seagrass beds well most of the time because people don't really understand or know more about these plants they often feel it's a way of also play off these without fully understanding the role that these plans are playing in the environment i guess that has a very long range effect to because as you said they affect the whole food chain right wing the is a high chance of some of them getting x thing as a result of the human activities and so most of them look almost the same except if they and if there are flowers it's difficult to tell them apart so in some instances you might also mistaken an endangered one or one dies highly trait in for one days less threatened by all because there is no much is the level of like do i don't with him to say the word extinction these things is a very very widespread and large now is it very significant the loss of some of these shows that at least seven percent of seagrass area is lost each year seventy year seven percent is lost each year so remember the if you put all the distribution out plants and it was shocking to find that derives from conservation it was i have been put in place but sadly they have been designed to protect animal species so mostly have been designed to protect sharks dolphin yes well corals but then the animals that i did begin of the food chain only incidentally included in the protection efforts so then i decided to explore and find diversity is still left unprotected and so that's a very big concern because scenes the known declining at least seven percent of the ranges is declining so one of the goals is to raise that i when is from one and you're saying well they've designated this area to protect say top predator is or some species mainly marine species but not the grass how can that be if it's if the grass is there or is the grass outside of it yeah so so yes so that's exactly how we describe it so my are in protected areas or my are in result does the same as we have get protected inside that square only incidentally including this is the whole vast portion of the sea grass ranges they say outside of that box and so it's been traits in because important thing it's true i'm sure they don't think about the grass being outside there on the perimeter or whatever but it's much wider than that that you have to take care of that you go all over the world i think looking at this now and i don't sure is this like a new area of science to be investigating the sea grasses and then i'd like to ask about what you're doing here right so so that's a very interesting feel an explorer are so it is a whole lot that is not known about sea grasses for example we do not fully know how much of the sea grass range is expanding or contracting techniques which we can extrapolate and predict given the current data to predict what will the ranges be in future sea in fifty years time or in hundred years time especially giving their ongoing changes in the climate yes climate change for example is leading to sea level rise and increased temperature and these also are  genes that predisposes them to live in that kind of environment to be able to withstand changes in their praise will in the marine environment as well as high tide and low tide change to still add up to these environments so what is it about the genetic makeup that makes them to survive successfully in that kind of environment of which are the land plants can one thing is that they are not equally related and so if the and equally related then it means that the changes in the enviro mean also impacts them differently as well so thought many things could have being responsible for that difference and so one of the reasons is that perhaps in the temporal region in the past the i would have been a whole lot of diversity but then due to the changes in the environment that happen years ago like the clash and the closure of the east most of you know so that i would have caused like a solid was migration of some of the leniencies you know moving from the northern hemisphere and perhaps passing through the tropics and they are found in the southern we're actually able to pick up that signature of sort of a long distance migration in the sea of the sea grasses such that we phone closely related species  on opposite sides of the wall like found in both northern and southern hemisphere and breaching the tropics and so those could have been some of the events that played out to  cause this kind of distribution pattern that we're finding where you have more unique species in the temperate fesses regions so you look at this like a long history in evolutionary history  to adjust what species are able to adjust to these kinds of stresses that they're you take that up to is that correct right so you're very comprehensive fed and have yeah so that's the exciting part of science this new generation and i would just like to underscore that that for i don't know how long now many fields are that is people become highly specialized and even in one field they can hardly talk to each other and you represent this trend as you say with things that are much more comprehensive they're looking at complex systems and you're looking at it in a complex way so  so it's all about the whole organism and an organism in an eco system does not live in isolation so many things play out you know to make the organism what it is so today because you have to combine all these pieces of evidence from different sources that weight allows you to get a more holistic picture of what is happening to an organism compared to how it was in the past where evidence often comes from just one source and so many other things our own about a fake the distribution of species so in our case we explains what we are looking at that's just really very interesting and fortunately we're out of time and i hope you'll come back and do some four for us but this is really appreciate this much more comprehensive approach and just in time because with the way we have solved the problems we've created has also been very narrow and as so this suggests that may so much for all of this great information and i wish you the very best you represent a whole new trend thank you very much