Florida is handing us dirty water and showing no signs of stopping. Each year our surface and ground water are diminished in quantity and quality and our state does little to reverse this.
Our DEP and water districts are deliberately not fixing this so it falls to the citizens to do their jobs. We absolutely must put this right in our constitution.
Voting our lucre-loving lawmakers out of office takes too long and it is not working anyway, there are just too many self-serving legislators who think only of the present and the dollar.
This article appeared in the Sun Sentinel at this link.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
Special report: Where has Florida’s seagrass gone, and can we bring it back?
By Bill Kearney | bkearney@sunsentinel.com | Sun Sentinel
July 31, 2023 at 8:30 a.m.
Editor’s note: This story is part one of a two-part series on the catastrophic seagrass die-offs plaguing nearly all of Florida’s coastal waters. The die-offs persist, raising the question: Can Florida keep its treasured seagrass in a hot and crowded 21st century?
Capt. Benny Blanco was skimming across the grass flats of Florida Bay, inside Everglades National Park, taking two clients to a prime fishing area, when he spotted something shocking — a mat of dead seagrass two miles long.
In his decades on the water as a fishing guide, he’d never seen anything like it. That’s when the horrible dread creeped in.
This much dead grass meant a die-off could spread and spread and spread. It could mean muddy water in Florida Bay, bringing the end of sight fishing, or stalking trophy fish in shallow water. It could mean the collapse of the foundation of the food chain, the collapse of one of the economic drivers of the region.
“I was inconsolable,” recalls Blanco. “I was just completely blown away that everything that I loved was literally dying in front of my eyes. I thought it would be there forever, because it was inside a national park.”
Blanco was very wrong about a national park being safe. In the ensuing two years a swath of meadows and banks nearly twice the size of Fort Lauderdale, totaling 50,000 acres, would disappear.
Similar scenes have rapidly been playing out all over Florida.
Between 2011 and 2016, all five of Florida’s major estuaries — Florida Bay, Biscayne Bay, the Indian River Lagoon, Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor — suddenly began to suffer catastrophic seagrass die-offs that continue to this day.
As a result, manatees are dying of starvation, trophy sea trout are vanishing, aquamarine bays are stained brown. And in the summer, as the water heats up, the stench of dead fish and toxic algae often wafts over high-end waterfront real estate.
Capt. Benny Blanco guides fishing clients in the Florida Bay in 2022. Some seagrass flats in the bay suffered severe die-offs in 2015, triggered by high salinity relating to a lack of freshwater in the Everglades. (Costa/Courtesy)
In the meantime, the forces that kill the grass — dirty water, heat and throngs of humanity — have only intensified.
As of 2023, Florida has become the fastest-growing state in the Union, and this July may turn out to be the hottest month ever recorded on planet Earth.
All of which raises the question: Does the Florida we are constructing in the 21st century mean the end of the state’s seagrass and the life that comes with it?
The value of a plant
For thousands of years, Florida has been rimmed with a wilderness of seagrass, resplendent with shrimp, manatees, millions of fish. No more.
Billowing underwater meadows have been replaced by barren mud and shell bottoms, the peninsula stripped nearly naked.
James Fourqurean, a seagrass specialist at Florida International University who’s been studying these flowering underwater plants for decades, said, “Seagrass is as important or more important here than anywhere else in the world.”
Why? Biodiversity and money. Some say they go hand in hand.
Study after study shows that seagrasses house more marine animal life than mud bottoms. They produce oxygen for fish, they feed manatees and green sea turtles, and their maze of stems are hide-outs for delicious crabs, shrimp and lobsters, in addition to dozens and dozens of species of juvenile fish that make humans lots of money: the dive industry, Florida’s $5 billion sportfishing industry and the menu at your favorite restaurant all rely on seagrass.
“Seagrasses and coral reefs are intricately interconnected,” Fourqurean said. “You don’t have to have seagrasses to have coral reefs, but there’s a lot more stuff for the animals that live on coral reefs to eat if there are seagrasses there. … So they’re integral components of this tropical seascape that we have in Florida.”
They also sequester vast amounts of carbon — key in the quest to slow climate change, and are a form of green infrastructure. The roots hold sediment in place, standing up to storms, weakening waves and keeping the water postcard-pretty. Estuaries without seagrass send sediment to nearby coral reefs, weakening those ecosystems as well.
Research at the University of Florida shows that seagrass beds can stay in place and create rich food chains for centuries. As of this century, these meadows are dying.
The implosion of Biscayne Bay
If you saw northern Biscayne Bay in 2013, you would have marveled at the fact that lush seagrass beds, replete with dolphins and sea trout, flourished in the shadows of sparkling new skyscrapers — somehow, the Miami-Dade megalopolis had not killed everything off.
But in 2014, the wide meadows north of the Tuttle Causeway, which connects Miami Beach to the mainland north of downtown, began to collapse. Within a few years, 80% to 90% of the grass in the Tuttle basin was gone. The southern bay, which runs from Key Biscayne south all the way to Key Largo, suffered too, but not as badly.
In August 2020 came the Miami fish kill. Thousands of dead fish began to pile up on the western shore like so much acrid litter. Those that survived — rays and shrimp — struggled close to the surface, desperate for dissolved oxygen. The same lack of oxygen killed the sea grass.
Miami-Dade County Imagery
Seagrass die-offs in northern Biscayne Bay (Tuttle basin) began to accelerate in 2011. In the years since, nearly 90% of the seagrass in that area has disappeared. (Miami-Dade County Imagery)
“When you see wildlife gasping for air, there are no words,” said Irela Bagué, Miami-Dade County’s Biscayne Bay officer. “You’re just like, what have we done? … That was the bay screaming for help; that was the big bay heart attack.”
To follow the metaphor, the cholesterol and stress had been accumulating for years.
Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, found in sewer and septic leaks, and in fertilizers for farms, golf courses and suburban lawns, had been running off into the bay for 60 years.
But around 2008, phosphorus levels in the canals flowing into the North Bay started to pick up, and spiked sharply between 2013 and 2014, according to the county’s 2019 seagrass report.
Then came an ominous warning from the federal government.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration studied nutrient load in the bay from 1995 to 2014 and concluded that if management didn’t drastically improve, the bay would go through a “regime shift” from “clear water and lush seagrass meadows to a murky system dominated by phytoplankton.”
Seagrass meadows can die off rapidly when humans add too much nutrients into the ecosystem.
Seagrass specialists suspect that adding phosphorus in Biscayne Bay first made the seagrass lush, but it eventually also fueled faster growing algae, which bloomed and clouded the water.
That cloudiness cut the seagrasses’ photosynthesis during the day, so there was less oxygen in the system. At night, the algae sucked up what little oxygen there was, killing the grass.
As some grasses died, they added nutrients to the system, and the mud they once held in place not only clouded the water even more, but released legacy phosphorus. This cascade of events can decimate whole meadows rapidly.
Florida International University seagrass specialist Jim Fourqurean with a handful of seagrass from Biscayne Bay. He says the turtle grass that once thrived close to shore has died off due to nutrients that favor algae. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
In some bays, phosphorus is the culprit, in others it’s nitrogen. And it’s not just nutrients. High water temperatures can topple the system; hot water holds less oxygen, and causes all the living things — grass, algae, fish — to consume oxygen more quickly.
Piero Gardinali is an FIU water chemistry expert, essentially a pollution detective, who’s working with Miami-Dade County on the crisis. He and his students gather data from solar-powered buoys in Biscayne Bay and canals that feed it.
He said the canals can be loaded with phosphorus and carry no oxygen. “Phosphorus is what’s causing problems here,” he said. “But I cannot figure out if it comes from fertilizer in agriculture, from wastewater treatment plants or from septic. So because of that, we have a hard time apportioning where the pollution comes from.”
There’s also another challenge. The limestone ridge, a pile of shell from an ancient sea upon which Miami is built, is so porous that the groundwater and canal water are essentially the same thing. Close a canal and there’s still seepage into the bay through the ground, Gardinali said.
“We know that nutrients are a problem, but we can’t really say it’s A, B or C, or it’s 25% this or 10% that. I always tell people, septic is easy to blame, because there’s no advocates for septic, there’s no lobby group for septic.”
That said, there are 120,000 septic systems in Miami-Dade County, half of which are in the North Bay watershed that’s collapsing. Most of the tanks the county labels as “persistent failure” are located along canals that drain into the North Bay.
Encroaching sea level rise will only make things worse, as salt water pushes fresh water up into septic systems. Nine-thousand of those systems are “vulnerable to compromise or failure under current groundwater conditions,” according to the county. By 2040 that number will jump to 13,500 unless the county acts aggressively.
Gardinali is concerned with how we’ve covered coastal land with concrete. “If you have an empty piece of land, it serves as an opportunity to recharge the groundwater through a filtering system — the land itself. In South Florida we are running out of empty land where we can put any runoff.”
As sea levels rise and rain events become more intense, flood resilience is paramount. But, he said, “building to prevent flooding usually means removing the water quickly, and putting it somewhere else.” That somewhere else is inevitably the bay, he said.
A goal of green infrastructure, such as planned wetland buffer zones, is to slow the water and clean it, removing sediment and some pollutants. ‘If we keep putting more people here and have no land for green infrastructure to delay the travel of water into the tributaries and bay, we’re not helping much,” he said.
Seagrass expert Fourqurean has a checklist and a timeline. “If we act quickly and stop phosphorus inputs, and clean up the watershed and get rid of septic tanks, I would hope we could stop the loss and … start restoring seagrass. But it’s gonna take 20 years.”
“Now there’s no seagrass,” Biscayne Bay officer Bagué said. “The water is murky. We have less wildlife. We have high levels of pollution. … Sure, growth is good, but how much is too much? That’s for leaders to decide. But the environment here is the economy. We can’t pit them against each other. There has to be a balance.”
The 2015 vanishing: Florida Bay dying of thirst
Fishing guide Benny Blanco’s hope that a national park would protect seagrass makes sense on the surface — humanity is nowhere in site.
The problem is, the massive underwater meadows at the southern tip of Florida are dependent on rain that falls in Orlando, delivered via the Everglades.
These days, the fresh water has to run the gauntlet of civilization — sprawling sugarcane fields, canals, highways — and it never reaches the seagrass. That makes the bay extra salty, particularly during a dry year such as 2015.
The Florida Bay die-off wasn’t about nutrients, it was about salt. When the salinity and water temperature kicks up and the wind dies down, the seagrass is primed for collapse.
“Hot water with a lot of salt doesn’t hold a lot of oxygen,” FIU’s Fourqurean said. “The grass is teetering on the edge of hypoxia. When the sun goes down, there’s no more photosynthesis. They use up all the oxygen pretty quickly.”
Once those two-mile-long dead mats of seagrass decompose, they can fuel algae blooms, and the cycle continues.
The lack of freshwater in Florida Bay is all about us.
For the past 4,000 to 6,000 years, the Everglades was a broad, shallow river percolating slowly through swamps and sawgrass from just south of Orlando, through Lake Okeechobee, spreading a sheet of water 50 miles wide across South Florida before mixing with the tide amid the mangrove labyrinth of the Ten Thousand Islands and Florida Bay.
Today, Lake Okeechobee is dammed. Lake water irrigates the vast horizons of sugar cane fields below it, known as the Everglades Agricultural Area.
When the lake gets dangerously high, the Army Corps of Engineers shoots millions of gallons of excess water east and west, into coastal estuaries near Fort Myers and Stuart. That water is high in nutrients and often laced with toxic blue-green algae. The sheer volume of freshwater kills seagrass, and the nutrients kneecap the estuaries.
The $23 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which Congress passed back in 2000, is an attempt to fix Florida’s water fiasco. Some of the 68 separate projects are done, some are not, and completion is decades away. In the end, it will reduce polluted Lake Okeechobee flows east and west, and send water south, to be cleaned in marshes, and then make its way to over-salted Florida Bay.
In 2015, when Blanco spotted the two-mile mass of dead seagrass, the bay had hit a tipping point.
“It was the worst year I’d ever witnessed in my life,” Blanco said.
Without seagrass holding the bottom in place, the slightest wind turns Florida Bay into chocolate milk.
This not only blocks the photosynthesis needed for new grass growth, it makes it tough for Blanco and his clients to sight-fish, his specialty. He uses a small skiff to stalk tarpon, snook and redfish in shallow water. You don’t cast until you see the fish, and you don’t see the fish in muddy water.
Blanco has to move constantly in search of clean water for his clients, or leave the park entirely to fish in the Keys, which can cause tension with other guides, who may be territorial.
Captain Benny Blanco stalks redfish and snook on the grass flats of Florida Bay. Blanco specializes in sight fishing, which requires clear water and skill. (Costa/Pat Rhea @livitfilms/ Courtesy)
Blanco fears for the region’s economy. “So, these people that were coming every year from all over the planet to sight fish in world-famous Florida Bay now were like, ‘Why would I spend five days and $10,000 (there) when I could just go to the Bahamas and for-sure have beautiful water?’
“If we want the 350 registered Everglades National Park (fishing) guides to have a piece of that pie five years from now, we have to protect that grass that’s producing the majority of the fish.”
Another side-effect of seagrass loss, as Blanco sees it, is that sharks are killing fish he would normally let go to reproduce.
He said that when the seagrass disappeared, snook and redfish had fewer places to hide and sharks had free reign. When they notice the commotion of a fish being caught, they hone in and snatch it.
“The shark population … has become unbearable, you cannot catch a snook or redfish in a few of the areas without sharks (killing the fish),” he said. That’s frustrating to a guide who practices catch-and-release.
He speaks with the urgency of a man who thinks the state is at the cusp of a paradigm shift, barely holding on to what’s left of its wilderness as the weight and waste of humanity becomes too much for nature to bear.
His seagrass saga has propelled him to become a conservation voice with the nonprofit Captains for Clean Water, with whom he’s lobbied the Florida Legislature to stop bills that would have hindered Everglades restoration.
He also sees hope.
“I’d say that we’ve had a considerable amount of regrowth. It’s not the turtle grass that we want to have there, it’s a type of eelgrass, which is better than mud. And, you know, it’s a start.”
Piero Gardinali, the FIU chemist studying Biscayne Bay, doesn’t want the public to give up hope, either.
“The worst thing we can do now is create a perception that things are bad and that nobody’s doing anything,” Gardinali said. “I think there are a whole lot of people that are putting a lot of effort into trying to make the right thing.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
Check back on Wednesday for Part Two of “Where Has All The Seagrass Gone?” We’ll delve into starving manatees in the Indian River Lagoon, how Florida’s west coast estuaries are struggling, and what the state is doing — or not doing — to keep seagrass alive in the 21st century.
Bill Kearney | Reporter
Bill Kearney is a reporter for the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
