In a noisy room at Cedar Island Marina in Clinton, a half a dozen volunteers bent over trays of clams, dabbing each one with glue and dipping them into clusters of tiny seeds.
Linda Mancini, one of the volunteers who signed up, had glue all over her fingers.
“I stick to the table! I stick to everything!” she said.
What looks like an adult version of arts and crafts is actually a unique way that conservationists are working – shell by shell – to restore eelgrass in Long Island Sound.
If the experiment of gluing eelgrass seeds to clamshells works, it could spell the return of a plant that’s struggled to thrive in one of the nation’s most biologically diverse estuaries for nearly 100 years.
But in the meantime, conservationists are going to need a lot of glue – and a healthy dab of patience.
A plant for spawning and for protection
Eelgrass is a tall, underwater plant used by fish for laying eggs. In addition to providing habitat for spawning, the plant also provides useful camouflage for fish looking to stay off the dinner menu of hungry predators.
“When a baby winter flounder is looking for cover, it'll go into those eelgrass meadows and hide out,” said Bill Lucey, Long Island Soundkeeper with environmental advocacy organization, Save the Sound.
“So when the hungry cormorant is swimming around looking for a meal, he doesn't see him,” Lucey said.
Long Island Sound used to be filled with eelgrass, but most of it was wiped out by an infectious disease in the early 20th century.
While eelgrass is making a comeback in some parts of the sound, progress has been slow.
There are a few reasons, according to Lucey. Invasive species such as mute swans are known to eat eelgrass and pull them up from the roots, while green crabs clip and remove eelgrass while they eat it.
Temperatures over 77 degrees can also harm the plants. While the yearly average temperatures in the sound are still in the 50s and 60s, climate activists worry about warming water temperatures.
“On top of that, I've seen jet skis going in big circles right around our eelgrass plots, and we had absolutely no eelgrass the next year where we had some the year before,” Lucey said. “Eelgrass has a lot of things working against it.”
Sticky fingers: Gluing eelgrass seeds to clamshells
Enter the clamshell. A small, mighty bivalve looking to boost eelgrass (with the help of lots of glue).
Since 2018 Rob Vasiluth has been diving to healthy eelgrass meadows, harvesting their seeds, and gluing them onto clamshells. He’s the founder of SAVE Environmental, a climate advocacy organization in New York dedicated to restoring eelgrass through natural means.
With the eelgrass seeds affixed, the clams have their moment in the conservation spotlight.
Volunteers take the clams to approved parts of Long Island Sound, where eelgrass populations are struggling, and drop the clams in the water. From there, the hearty bivalves burrow into the sand and mud, thereby planting the eelgrass.
“They'll bury the seeds for us,” Vasiluth said. “By gluing these seeds to clams, it's forcing the clam to take these seeds with it and mimicking this natural recruitment method.”
The experiment has shown some signs of success, but environmental advocates want to see if they can do it on a larger scale.
Still, the current scale is already pretty big.
With the help of volunteers, Save the Sound glued approximately 275,000 eelgrass seeds onto 30,000 clams from September to November. They plan to monitor the success of the plantings in the spring using drone photography, satellite imagery and divers.
“What we're doing now is trying to figure out a way to mass plant eelgrass, to do it on an industrial scale,” Lucey said.
Vasiluth said he’s ready. A conveyor belt machine he designed can churn out 20,000 clams in an hour.
“I would love to do the whole entirety of Long Island Sound,” Vasiluth said.
Áine Pennello is a Report for America corps member, covering the environment and climate change for Connecticut Public
