How scientists are testing a co2 retaining compound and its effects on seagrass.
On Saturday, I interviewed Savanna Zeiger, a lab technician at Florida International University. She and a group of FIU researchers in collaboration with Vesta are working to test the Olivine compound and its effects on seagrass.
This compound is specifically as stated by Vesta “carbon-removing sand made of the natural mineral olivine”. It completely removes carbon dioxide. How? well, the process isn't as complicated as one may think. This natural mineral Olivine is taken and crushed into beach sand, well not your typical white beach sand ( view the first picture). Then it is placed in coastal areas that have prominent Ocean Acidification or high levels of dissolving Co2. This sand then gradually dissolves and reacts with the ocean water, causing for the Co2 to be permanently stored. The cool thing about this process is its acceleration of the natural chemical weathering of olivine- it's something that has been produced by the earth. Nothing synthetic.
Although this compound is naturally occurring around the world, large amounts of it could cause some unforeseen side effects. As a result, Vesta has invested in investigating its effects on different ecosystems. I got some insight into its effects in the seagrass beds.
Florida International University conducted this investigation with 20 tanks. Working with two types of seagrass, turtle grass, and manatee grass. All of the tanks had the same sediment base layer, then they were split into groups of five. One group of five had a layer of Olivine and seagrass. The second group had an additional layer of sediment and seagrass. The third group had no added layers and seagrass. The last group had an additional olivine layer but no seagrass.
These are some of the results that were found for Turtle grass or Thalassia testudinum:
(The Olovine compound was added on week 28 or October 4th)
These are some of the results for Manatee Grass or Syringodium Filiforme:
Overall, Savanna said there were no overall adverse or beneficial effects from the olivine but that further testing had to be done. If you want to learn more about this project or want to understand more about what's going on in these graphs listen to the interview below.
Transcript:
Hello, my name is Manuela Caldas, and today I’m going to be speaking with Savanna Zeiger. She is a lab technician at FIU and is doing some very incredible research. But before we delve into her research, I asked Savannah to explain to me the problem that her research was trying to solve.
So basically, we’re putting co2 into the atmosphere, humans are putting too much co2 into the atmosphere. And we’re taking away the resources that remove co2 from the atmosphere through carbon emissions, which is through factories and cars and things like that, basically, because we’re building and we’re taking down trees and we’re damaging the environment, the things that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, our environment can no longer like offset the carbon dioxide that we’re putting out there. So the problem is excess co2. What’s the solution? What does it have to do with seagrass? Savanna gave us the answer.
seagrasses are a major carbon sink, which means they pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and from the water and they keep it stable. And they use that because they asked as many other plants do, they use it and they put out oxygen.
Her research is just a small piece of this large puzzle. She’s working to protect seagrass to test its reaction to a revolutionary compound. Let’s talk more about our ongoing research.
So the project that I’m part of is called the Vetsa project. What we’re doing is we’re researching the impacts that a certain mineral called olivine has on sea grasses that are found out in the Caribbean or like in South Florida waters, Biscayne Bay. Basically, this mineral is very abundant in the volcanic matter and it’s found around the world. Hawaii you know the green sand beaches that are in Hawaii, you know how to have black sand beaches, but they also have green sand beaches, those beaches are made up of Halloween. So it’s like sediment found like on the surface and it sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Just naturally like through weathering waves break down the mineral and then the minerals sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So they basically asked us to do this research on seagrass. They want to know how the mineral affects seagrasses like turtle grasses, and manatee grass, which are abundant in the Caribbean and in South Florida. Because if it like helps the seagrass or if it has no negative effects on the seagrass, they want to consider putting this mineral into environments near seagrass beds to help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If we can take this mineral and basically put it in areas that are most impacted by climate change and carbon dioxide and increase in carbon dioxide, a possible, not full solution but like a mitigation to the excess carbon dioxide.
So we heard a little bit of what she’s testing. So how does she do it?
We collected some seagrass fragments from the field. Just in Biscayne Bay, like in really shallow areas, we collected manatee grass and turtle grass. We brought him back into our lab where we had tanks that we had like set up 15 or 20-gallon tanks and can’t remember anything 15-gallon tanks to see grass in the times when we added sediment just like really common aquarium sediment use like Bahama light sediment, planted the tank basically let them acclimate for a really long time. And then we were just collecting data on the seagrasses to get a lot of baseline information. So we did that for a really long time. We added the olivine after 28 weeks of cycling, which is a long long while. So we collected data and then we added the Alvine and 20 tanks. We did five tanks that contained every tank containing the same amount of regular sediment and then we added all of them to five tanks that had seagrass. Then we had five tanks that we got an additional sediment layer and had seagrass but no olivine five tanks that got no additional sediment and no olivine just like no additional treatment basically but still had seagrass and then five tanks that received the olivine treatment without seagrass. So those two were those no seagrass and the no treatment were kind of like our controls. And then we continue collecting data. Essentially what we looked at was the number of chutes that grew in the tank and the length of the leaves that grew in the tank and for the turtle grass. We also looked at the width of the league we all also regularly, of course, check type regular parameters like temperature and salinity. And we also looked at pH because the olivine was to have a small impact on the pH. So with the timeline that we had, we didn’t have a ton of time to see any long-term trends. But from what we observed, the pH was slightly lower in the tanks that had the all-event and slightly higher in the tanks that didn’t have the olivine shoot count. So the number of shoots per tank basically grew for the entire duration of the project, they had a slight like the tiniest little dip, maybe when we added the olivine, but then didn’t really really impact the effect or anything. And the seagrass is like continued to grow more shoots.
So they didn’t like decrease or increase because of all of them, they continue to just play kind of a like an upward trend. If the shoe counts are increasing, that just tells us that most likely the seagrasses were doing pretty well. You know, if they’re able to produce new shoots within the system, then there must be something good happening in the system, leaf length, where actually they went on like a downward trend. So they were getting, they were getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And then we added the olivine. And actually, they started growing longer again, which was kind of interesting, even on the treatment that we did the sediment addition, without the olivine, they increase a little bit, sometimes they get longer when they’re competing for space or competing for sunlight. Of course, we use regular lights. So I think that’s why the length initially decreased for a while, because they weren’t competing for light, so they didn’t have to stretch longer. And as the tanks became denser with the increase of shoots, I think that might have also contributed to the length of the seagrasses increasing some more, another big indicator for health was looking at the PAM four on a tree. And Pam is pulse amplitude modulated, which basically looks at the efficiency of the photosynthetic system. So that’s like what percentage of photons are being used to photosynthesize, and it’s never going to reach 100%. But ours were averaging around, 80% or so which was pretty good. We had one tank that had a weird dip in it. But that could have been something irrelevant to the treatments, I could have been there something we did wrong. When we added all of the there was no change really, like the percentages stayed the same for the entire duration of the project without the treatment and with the treatment. So overall, our tanks had increasing cloudiness, when we added the mineral. It wasn’t, you know, super crazy or anything like that. But the tanks that had it worse were the ones that didn’t have seagrass. So it could be that this mineral releasing something, you know, we don’t know what but maybe releasing something into the water that is not good for the water, but maybe something that the seagrass can keep under control, it’s hard to say, we did collect water samples as well, but we haven’t gotten them processed, because we’re not doing that at FIU. They’re going to have them sent to VESA and other areas to process those. But in terms of like animals, yeah, it’s possible that I guess it could maybe have a good or bad effect on animals because the mineral does also released trace metals like nickel and cobalt as it breaks down.
So that could have an impact on you know, fish because other metals have had impacts on fish like mercury, it’s not, you know, rising Mercury is bad for animals in their bodies if it’s too much. So something like that could really have a bad effect on animals. But at the same time, it breaks the mineral breaking down and could also have you know, maybe the trace metals are so minimal that it doesn’t matter, I would say it would be beneficial to do this same research project over again, over and over again, like a couple more times to really like to solidify the kind of impacts that all of you may have on seagrass, like the seagrass health didn’t get any worse, for the most part, but they didn’t really like greatly improved due to the olivine. The tanks that actually had the most growth were the ones that received extra sediment, but not the ones that received all of them. So, overall from like what we looked at all of them had more of a neutral impact rather than anything else. So it was a very like early preliminary type of research in the very early stages of a bigger project. The biggest thing they wanted to be answered was whether the olivine would kill the seagrass and then everything else we took from that was just additional information. One so they could get as much as possible out of the research project.
Why work so hard to see how this olivine compound affects seagrass? if we established previously seagrass is just another co2 sink. And all of you are kind of replacing that by taking in co2. Why is it so important to protect seagrass? What is seagrass add to our ecosystem other than being co2 sink? How can the extinction of seagrass affect our ocean ecosystems
theorists can affect the ocean ecosystem in massive ways. So there is the chemistry aspects basically that they take out excess carbon dioxide, and they put out oxygen and they keep the ocean chemistry stable. On top of that, they also are like nurseries and their homes to millions of animals. So not only are they handling ocean chemistry, but they’re also providing habitats for animals. And a lot of animals that live at home like the coral reef or the open ocean, live in seagrass beds when they’re young, and then travel out to the coral reefs when they’re a lot older. And then there are also animals that stay in the seagrass beds for their entire life. So if seagrass becomes unhealthy, that has an impact on the chemistry of the water, and also habitat, it would be considered, you know, in the realm of habitat loss, and then seagrass also acts as a barrier against waves. So the ocean is kind of like made up if you look at the shoreline. For example, in the Atlantic Ocean around Florida, the coral reefs are way out in the water. And they really blocked us more than we realized from like too much water coming into shore. And what gets essentially kind of what gets through that first line of defense comes through the seagrass beds, which also hold things in place and prevent erosion and prevent water from coming too far into shore. And then on top of that, we go on to the land and we have the sand dunes which block things as well. So the seagrasses are kind of like one of the lines of defense to protect the shorelines. And if they all die off, then you’re losing protection for the shorelines on top of losing habitat. And something that regulates ocean chemistry. I think evolved as seagrass has died. I mean, millions of animals would die milk people would probably begin to die too. Because if you lose a habitat as big as the seagrasses, you know a lot of people consider comparing that to like the Amazon. And if we were to lose the Amazon that’s like the lungs of the earth, the seagrasses are, are also like, like if Amazon is one hug, you know, seagrasses are the other log and you need both lungs to function, the Earth would greatly suffer and we would suffer on top of that. And the ocean I don’t think the ecosystems would essentially kind of fall apart. You know, there’s always a chance that some animals and plants would still adapt somehow. But for the most part like the oceans and the land would be nothing like they are now.
If you want to learn more about the FIU team and savannas research, or the Vesta project, visit www. Vesta. Earth. Thanks so much for listening. Catch you later.
