What effect has the blanket of Ulva had on the animals of Leisure Island’s Steenbok Channel shoreline?
In early 2011, when the Steenbok Channel was clothed in a luxuriant and healthy eelgrass bed, Richard Barnes investigated its invertebrate fauna at a series of nine points (at Kingfisher Creek near its junction with the Ashmead Channel, at its head near the Armstrong Causeway, and at a point halfway between the two, adjacent to the Reserve's Indigenous Garden; and at three points down the shore at each of those three sites - low water neap, mean low water, and low water spring). Early this year, he sampled those same nine points again but in 2018 in areas of bare mud left after loss of the seagrass. This was a race against time before the bare mud itself disappeared under...
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