A race to map the world’s seagrass – before it disappears

From the leaves down to the roots, these unassuming plants work as ‘ecosystem engineers’, yet they’ve become one of the least protected species of coastal life, writes Allyson Chiu

Naval officer Ibrahim Moses Kargbo in his diving gear at a newly discovered area of seagrass off Hoong island in Sierra Leone (Guy Peterson/The Washington Post)

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 (EPA), 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.