Sunday, July 14, 2013
Miami — Just about every summer for the past decade or more, anglers and guides who ply the Indian River Lagoon have prayed for drought. Drought means less discharge of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie Estuary. Lower-than-normal rainfall means less chance of storm drains gushing, sewage treatment plants overflowing and septic tanks leaking.
But the summer of 2013 has been anything but dry so far, and too much fresh water is only one of a myriad of factors that might be propelling the 156-mile lagoon toward ecological collapse.
“Unless they do something quick — like yesterday — this isn’t going to be a viable body of water,” Palm City fly-fishing guide Marcia Foosaner said. “It’s really heart-breaking. It was such a great area.
“I think this has hit the tipping point.”
Throughout the lagoon — a shallow body of water sheltered by barrier islands that extends from just north of Jupiter Inlet to Ponce Inlet — horror stories abound: dead manatees, pelicans and dolphins; sporadic fish kills; once-lush meadows of sea grass now gone; pervasive algae blooms; and foul-smelling, opaque waters.
“For me, sight fishing is out,” said Foosaner, a dedicated wader. “The water looks so bad, I felt like I had to fumigate myself.”
The lagoon has experienced sea grass die-offs and algae blooms before, but practically nobody can remember anything like what has been going on since the spring of 2011. That’s when a “superbloom” of phytoplankton overtook the Mosquito Lagoon and northern Indian River Lagoon, and more than 30,000 acres of sea grass died. As if that weren’t trouble enough, in June last year the area was beset by brown algae blamed for ecological problems in Texas estuaries in the 1990s but never seen before in Florida. The brown algae, which turned previously clear waters a muddy brown, was followed by a reddish algae that creates saxitoxin, a poison that makes people ill.
The brown algae subsided last winter, according to captain Chris Myers, who conducts charters in Mosquito Lagoon.
“November through May, it was crystal clear,” Myers said. “But as soon as that water hit 75 degrees, it’s exploded again. It’s from Titusville, Fla., north to the dead end of the river and all of Mosquito Lagoon. It’s made what I do - sight fishing - in the lagoon, it kills it.”
But not all lagoon waters are steeped in algae and mud.
For some reason, the area around Sebastian Inlet remains crystal clear, according to veteran light-tackle guide Glyn Austin of Palm Bay.
“The water is clean with no habitat,” Austin said. “Eighty percent of the grass is gone on the flats at the inlet. I’m not sure why it died. There are some fish around — snook, trout and redfish.”
Scientists and resource managers say they cannot pinpoint exactly what’s killing the grass, birds and marine mammals, but there are several possible causes — excessive fresh water releases; degradation of water quality; nutrient and contaminant loading; and ocean acidification — or a combination of all of these factors.
The Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce was supposed to get $2 million from the state to look into the problem, but Gov. Rick Scott vetoed the bill.
The Indian River Estuary Program is looking at the feasibility of channeling more ocean water into the estuary to flush out the algae and dirty water. Possibilities include dredging a new inlet or deepening the existing ones, or building culverts through the barrier islands. Some people are even hoping a hurricane will blast a new path into the lagoon.
Meanwhile, the problems already are affecting the livelihoods of fishing guides who earn their living putting anglers on fish in the lagoon.
“You’ve either got to tell people the truth and half of them don’t want to go, or you could lie to them, then they’ll see how bad it is and they’ll tell everybody,” Myers said.
“I don’t know that there’s any cure that man can do.”