From the deck of a small blue and white boat, Bashiru Bangura leaned forward and peered into the ocean, his gaze trained on a large dark patch just beneath the jade green waves.
“It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!” crowed a local fisherman, who led Bangura to this spot roughly 60 miles off the coast of Freetown. “It looks black!”
Bangura, who works for Sierra Leone’s Environment Protection Agency, tempered his excitement. After two unsuccessful attempts to find seagrass in this group of islands, he questioned whether the shadowy blotches were meadows of the critical underwater greenery he and other researchers have spent the past several years trying to locate along the coast of West Africa.
It was only once he was standing in the waist-high water, marveling at the tuft of scraggly hair-like strands he’d uprooted to collect as a sample, that he allowed himself to smile.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/clim...seagrass-ecosystem-aquatic-wildlife-scarcity/
“It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!” crowed a local fisherman, who led Bangura to this spot roughly 60 miles off the coast of Freetown. “It looks black!”
Bangura, who works for Sierra Leone’s Environment Protection Agency, tempered his excitement. After two unsuccessful attempts to find seagrass in this group of islands, he questioned whether the shadowy blotches were meadows of the critical underwater greenery he and other researchers have spent the past several years trying to locate along the coast of West Africa.
It was only once he was standing in the waist-high water, marveling at the tuft of scraggly hair-like strands he’d uprooted to collect as a sample, that he allowed himself to smile.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/clim...seagrass-ecosystem-aquatic-wildlife-scarcity/