Growing Seagrass in Yellow River Estuary Restoration Bid

Xinhua/APP

Jinan: The receding tide at the mouth of the Yellow River in Kenli District of the city of Dongying, east China’s Shandong Province, revealed a vast seagrass bed on a morning in late September.

Dozens of workers walked back and forth, gathering Japanese eelgrass seeds to be sown next spring. The seeds, which were about the size of sesame seeds, were not fully mature yet, and the workers put them in mesh bags and then soaked them in water to allow the eelgrass to continue growing.

“Seagrass seeds are too light and will be easily washed away by the waves when they are fully mature, so collecting them around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival is the best strategy,” said Zhou Yi, a researcher at the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Zhou Yi, who has been engaged in seagrass bed research for more than 20 years, visits the special “grassland” in the Yellow River estuary every second month. “his seagrass bed is about 30 hectares in size, and most of it has been restored in the past three or four years,” he explained. The Yellow River estuary is one of the native homes of Japanese eelgrass and was once the largest Japanese eelgrass bed in China.