In Cambodia’s Kep Archipelago, fleets of trawlers dragging weighted, electrified nets have reduced the area’s once sprawling seagrass meadows to a sludgy underwater wasteland and sent fisheries into a tailspin.Here and around the world, seagrass meadows are in decline. But these critical habitats serve as nurseries and feeding grounds for many marine organisms, as well as bulwarks against climate change and ocean acidification by capturing carbon dioxide.In the Kep Archipelago a small NGO is working to establish a marine refuge that will keep the trawlers at bay so seagrass meadows can recover and depleted fish stocks can return to life. KEP ARCHIPELAGO, Cambodia – It’s not long before midnight and an outlaw trawler has been spotted. The captain — a weather-gnarled old fisherman wearing just boxer shorts — winces as flashlights illuminate his face. He takes a drag of a cigarette and grins as his crew hauls in their catch. “Here he is with all the seagrass in his net,” says Paul Ferber, the founder and head of Marine Conservation Cambodia (MCC), as his boat pulls alongside the trawler to take video evidence during a patrol for illegal fishing. “Same guy. He just doesn’t care.” For nine years, the NGO MCC has been documenting the decline of marine ecosystems off the southern coast of Cambodia, where fish stocks have plummeted as once-thriving habitats are reduced to a sludgy underwater wasteland. The main perpetrators of the destruction are fleets of trawlers that drag weighted, electrified nets through the shallow waters here almost every night. Their main target is shrimp but their methods are indiscriminate. Like a bulldozer through forest, they cut swathes of life out of the sea and scars into the ocean floor. Sunken a few inches into the seabed, the nets churn up and electrocute everything in their path, including the seagrass meadows that once sprawled the bay. After more than a decade of intensive trawling, the ecosystem is at the brink of collapse by MCC’s assessment. “There’s not much left out there,” said Ferber, 40, a British diver who has been living on Koh Seh, the most remote island in the Kep Archipelago, for almost four years. “In some places, there are no signs of life at all. It’s just dead.” Illegal fishermen clear their nets after hauling them in full of seagrass. The seagrass and the juvenile marine animals that live within it usually die on board the boat before being thrown overboard. Photo courtesy of MCC. In Kep and around the world, seagrasses, a critical but oft-forgotten element of marine shallow-water ecosystems, are in decline. Their extensive root systems form webs that bind and stabilize the substrate, in the same way that land grasses work against erosion. From this foundation, habitats flourish. In open waters, seagrass meadows provide shelter for fish and invertebrates to mate and to store their eggs. They are a nursery for juvenile shrimp, fish and seahorses taking cover from ocean currents and predators. Turtles and dugongs feed directly on seagrasses, and dolphins feed on organisms that live within them. When seagrasses decompose, worms, sea cucumbers and phytoplankton feast on the nutrients. And, perhaps most importantly, seagrass meadows capture and store carbon dioxide in the same way that forests do, often at a superior rate, combating rising water temperatures, acidification and climate change. “It’s simple,” said Ferber, “if the seagrass is gone, the entire habitat is gone.”