Seagrass Is Dying by Tampa and Sarasota as Red Tide Worsens By Associated Press | April 1, 2023, at 6:07 pm
BRADENTON, Fla. (AP) — New surveys of seagrass on Florida’s Gulf Coast shows the vital marine plant is continuing to lose ground at a rapid pace in Tampa and Sarasota Bay.
Since 2016, the Southwest Florida Water Management District has documented losses of almost 30% of Tampa Bay’s seagrass and around 26% in Sarasota Bay.
The decline comes after local waters were slammed with pollution from the Piney Point industrial site and severe red tides over the past several years.
But the seagrass losses also have increased despite many areas meeting state water quality targets, which environmentalists say need changing.
Scientists say action must be taken to prevent Tampa and Sarasota’s seagrass ecosystem from collapsing like the one in the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s east coast, where manatee deaths are highest.
IMPORTANCE OF SEAGRASS
Any ecologist will tell you that seagrasses are one of the ocean’s MVPs (most valuable plants).
From sheltering and feeding marine life to storing carbon and preventing erosion, the marine greens are a vital part of the ecosystem — not to mention the preferred produce of the iconic Florida manatee.
Unfortunately, seagrass meadows are also one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the world; climate change, pollution, red tides and other human-influenced problems are top threats.
A die-off is now playing out on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where seagrass meadows are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Scientists take it as a warning sign for the overall health of area waters.
“It’s further evidence that we really need to get our act together quickly,” said David Tomasko, executive director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program.
ARE WATER QUALITY STANDARDS STRONG ENOUGH?
In Tampa Bay and Sarasota Bay, the seagrass losses came despite many areas meeting state water quality targets.
“Old Tampa Bay and Hillsborough Bay are examples of that,” said Chris Anastasiou, chief scientist of water quality and the lead of seagrass mapping efforts for the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). “We are meeting the criteria, yet we’re still seeing reductions of seagrass and in some cases increases in macroalgae or drift algae.”
Tomasko and SBEP are recommending that the state adopts stronger and more comprehensive water quality standards to address the disconnect.
“The State of Florida reports on the health of estuaries based only on what was captured in a water bottle,” Tomasko said. “We think that’s not enough.”
Currently, Florida Department of Environmental Protection standards call for measuring phosphorous and nitrogen (nutrients that can feed harmful algal blooms) and levels of chlorophyll-a, an indicator of algae abundance, in samples collected from from waterways.
But a water sample collected at the surface doesn’t necessarily capture a complete picture of an ecosystem’s health.
“You can have a macroalgae bloom that’s burying a seagrass meadow, but the water looks fine at the surface,” Tomasko said. “The current standards are missing a lot of the problem.”
The estuary program issues “ecosystem health report card” for Sarasota Bay that considers a more diverse set of factors. It includes concentrations of nitrogen, but also seagrass health and the presence of various types of algae throughout the water column.
Water managers are also taking another look at how much nitrogen the bays can handle.
When it is overabundant, nitrogen can feed multiple kinds of algae that can grow out of control, choking seagrass beds and blocking their access to sunlight.
“We’re trying to understand the pathway of nitrogen once it’s in the water,” said Anastasiou.
He and the SFWMD work closely with estuary programs to monitor the health of bays and develop new recommendations for improving conditions. The recent seagrass losses have underlined that a new approach may be necessary to keep up with the increasing strain on Florida’s waters as population and development expand.
“What we’re doing more and more is taking that holistic approach,” Anastasiou said. “Do all the indicators suggest that this estuary is healthy?”
With the proper response, Anastasiou believes seagrass can bounce back.
“It absolutely can be turned around,” he said.
REPORT SHOWS RECORD SEAGRASS LOSS, BUT SOME SILVER LININGS
Every two years, the state conducts a seagrass survey of five estuaries along the Suncoast, including Tampa Bay and Sarasota Bay.
The 2020-22 survey showed major seagrass declines for both bays. Tampa Bay lost 12% of its seagrass coverage, or over 4,100 acres, and Sarasota Bay took a 6% hit of over 570 acres.
In Tampa Bay, it’s the third survey in a row that has revealed shrinking seagrass meadows — a record since the monitoring program began in 1988. Within that region, Hillsborough Bay lost 51% of mappable seagrass, and Old Tampa Bay lost 38%.
Sarasota Bay’s loses are also stacking up.
“It’s a mixed bag,” Tomasko said. “In 2020-22, we lost 5% of our seagrass meadows. The two years before that, we lost 18%. If there’s any good news, it’s that is doesn’t look like the losses are accelerating,” he added. “This isn’t necessarily going to get worse and worse. We hope it’s bottoming out.”
Up until 2016, Tampa Bay and Sarasota Bay seagrass abundance was at healthiest levels seen in decades. But six years marred with severe red tides, industrial pollution and sewage spills wiped out a big chunk of that progress.
“If you lose too much seagrass, there’s a concern that you’ll be a different system moving forward,” Tomasko said. “You won’t have seagrass; you’ll have a system dominated by algae.”
The Manatee River, which feeds into Lower Tampa Bay, lost 19% of its mappable seagrass between 2020 and 2022.
Most of the loss was in areas populated by patchy seagrass, which are more likely to recede for a time and come back, Anastasiou said. The densest, most healthy sections of seagrass in the Manatee River actually grew by 22 acres in the two-year window — a gain of 11%.
“All the loss we saw was much further up the river,” Anastasiou said. “It’s not good, we don’t want to see loss. But when you look at it in context, it’s not as bad as the numbers might suggest.”
There were also pockets of seagrass gain in Sarasota and Tampa Bay despite the overall loss.
A bright spot in the survey was at the north end of the district near the Pinellas-Pasco border. In St. Joseph Sound and Clearwater Harbor, SWFMD’s survey found net seagrass gains that put the estuaries at record high levels of seagrass coverage.
Estuaries in Southwest Florida did not fare so well. Overall seagrass losses were recorded in Dona and Roberts Bay, Lemon Bay and Charlotte Harbor.
IS PINEY POINT TO BLAME FOR SEAGRASS DECLINE?
On March 30, 2021, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection authorized the emergency release of 215 million gallons of contaminated water from Piney Point, a retired phosphate processing plant in Manatee County on the edge of Lower Tampa Bay.
According to estuary program scientists, the environment is still reeling.
“Piney Point was probably the worst thing that happened to Tampa Bay for 50 years,” said Tomasko, who has worked on multiple studies tracing the pollution event’s impact. “It was like 200 million gallons of liquid fertilizer. It’s going to take awhile for us to get through this. It’s going to have manifestations.”
Tomasko estimates that 80% of the seagrass loss in the most recent survey is in areas affected by the plume of the spill.
A study published in May 2022 in Marine Pollution Bulletin found that the spill likely made that year’s red tide much more severe by feeding it about 180 metric tons of nitrogen. The untimely bloom killed hundreds of tons of marine life in Tampa Bay and Southwest Florida waters.
“We believe that a certain amount of this loss of seagrass is attributed to Piney Point,” Tomasko said. “We also believe that it created some of the worst macroalgal blooms in upper Sarasota Bay in people’s memory.”
COULD FLORIDA’S GULF COAST BE THE NEXT INDIAN RIVER LAGOON?
What happens when a key species like seagrass disappears from its ecosystem? The effects can be disastrous. Once sand and seagrass, the bottom of the Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s east coast is now covered in muck and wildlife are in crisis.
Anastasiou said Florida’s Gulf estuaries and the Indian River Lagoon are ecologically very different. However, the threat of major marine habitat loss for Florida’s Gulf Coast is very real, he said.
“There is always that danger,” Anastasiou said. “Fortunately, we still have a long way to go before we get to that point. But we don’t want to be in a position where we’re worried about that.
“Now is the time to really take action and understand what’s happening.”
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO BRING BACK SEAGRASS?
Scientists believe the best way to help seagrass meadows return and thrive is to crack down on water pollution, especially nitrogen, from all sources.
Everyone has a part to play, Tomasko said.
“The government needs to upgrade stormwater systems. The regulators need to be more timely in fixing problems and enforcing. And the general public needs to do their part,” Tomasko said.
If you’ve got a green lawn and you’re complaining about an algal bloom, maybe you’re part of the problem.”
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
It’s Toxic Slime Time on Florida’s Lake Okeechobee Huge green blooms are threatening wildlife, pets, people and cities. And algae season is only getting started.
Writer Dan Egan and photographer Josh Ritchie reported from Okeechobee’s shores, dodging the lake’s noxious fumes to understand the crisis and its costs.
July 9, 2023
For thousands of years, Lake Okeechobee pumped life into Florida’s swampy interior. Summer rains swelled the shallow inland sea, creating seasonal overflows that sustained the Everglades and its alligators, panthers, spoonbills and snail kites.
But a vast re-engineering over the past century has transformed Okeechobee into something life-threatening as much as life-giving. Toxic algal blooms now regularly infest much of its 730-square-mile surface during the summer, producing fumes and waterborne poisons potent enough to kill pets that splash in the contaminated waters, or send their owners to the doctor from inhaling the toxins.
The Okeechobee mess, caused mainly by phosphorus-based agricultural fertilizers, festered out of the public consciousness for decades. But in recent summers the problem has become more dire. Climate change is making storms and rainfall more intense and less predictable, and last fall Hurricane Ian stirred up so much phosphorus that this summer is expected to be particularly bad.
Things get further complicated when lake levels climb so high that contaminated water must be released into canals — toward coastal cities like Fort Myers and Stuart — to protect the structural integrity of the 143-mile-long dike holding back the lake.
The coming weeks will offer a serious test.
Algal bloom extent on June 12 Source: Satellite image by Landsat By Leanne Abraham
Lake Okeechobee’s Toxic Algae Blooms Threaten Florida and Could Get Worse - The New York Times Rainy season is just starting, but by late June the lake’s level was roughly two feet higher than the United States Army Corps of Engineers would like. While that’s a few feet below the dike’s potential danger zone, history has shown that Okeechobee can swell by that much in less than a month.
Adding to the worry: More than half the lake is already suffering algal blooms. And the algae season has months to go.
This has people downstream bracing for another summer of sludge. “We’re looking at a bullet in the chamber here,” said Eve Samples, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Everglades.
The state and the Army Corps of Engineers are trying to reduce the toxic flows to the coasts with a controversial re-engineering plan that has been decades in the making, including building a new lake from scratch to contain and decontaminate Okeechobee’s discharges.
Star Robinson has watched the lake become perilous.
Sunrise over Pahokee and Lake Okeechobee.
Yet critics worry it’s still not enough, particularly as the world keeps warming. Scientists say hurricanes are getting not only more powerful because of climate change, but also wetter. Ian last year most likely dropped 10 percent more rain than would have been expected in a world without warming, researchers have said.
Star Robinson, 55, grew up playing in and around Okeechobee. But in recent years her relationship with the lake has soured. On a morning jog in the city of Pahokee a few weeks ago, she kept at least 100 yards from the shoreline, and with good reason. Any closer and she risked choking on the lake’s lung-burning fumes.
The only activity near the water’s edge? A cluster of buzzards. “They just love the smell of death and decay,” she said.
The vapors come from rotting mats of a type of toxic algae — technically a cyanobacteria — that thrives in Okeechobee’s tea-warm water and feasts on rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the phosphorus-rich fertilizer and manure that wash off cropland and into the lake.
Note: Not all land cover uses are depicted Sources: United States Geological Survey; OpenStreetMap By Leanne Abraham
The immediate dangers include lung infections and gastrointestinal distress. There are also concerns that long-term exposure could lead to organ damage and the risk of certain neurological disorders.
“This has become almost like a permanent condition,” said Gil Smart, executive director of VoteWater, a nonpartisan group pushing for a more ambitious fix. “It’s like you have spring, you have summer, and you have algae bloom season,” he said. “Like clockwork.”
Similar outbreaks have struck lakes elsewhere, including Lake Champlain, Lake Erie and Lake Tahoe. But Okeechobee is different. It is warm, flat and shallow as a backyard pool — making it more like a supersize petri dish than the wellspring of the Everglades.
Ms. Robinson, the jogger, said she knows how to fix a lake that has “gone to hell.”
“Stop the polluting,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the solution.”
It’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
Old dike, new hope
The Herbert Hoover Dike, a grassy berm protecting lives and livelihoods.
The crisis was borne of decisions starting a century ago to tame the lake by holding back its seasonal overflows in order to drain swamps, creating rich farmland. That has transformed southern Florida into one of the most important sugar-cane-producing regions in the world.
It came at a heavy cost.
Disaster struck in 1926, when a hurricane collapsed part of the dike, drowning hundreds of people. The dike was patched, but two years later it happened again, this time killing thousands.
By the 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers proclaimed it had finally controlled the lake with what is now called the Herbert Hoover Dike, a mound of sand, rock and seashells rising a couple of stories above the table-flat landscape.
Since the dike severed the lake’s natural flow into the Everglades, the corps now operates canals to carry much of the outflows eastward to the city of Stuart on the Atlantic coast, and west to Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast.
For decades, the canals carried away lake water. Then, the algae came.
The aftermath of the 1928 hurricane, which killed thousands of people. Roy Senff, Everett Collection Inc., via Alamy
Rehabilitating the Herbert Hoover Dike in 1968. U.S.D.A.-A.R.S. Canal Point Sugarcane Field Station
About a decade ago, Okeechobee’s outflows began triggering intense downstream algae outbreaks as green as anything Sherwin-Williams might concoct. The coastal impact was particularly bad in 2013, 2016 and 2018, causing beach closures, business shutdowns and even some residential evacuations. (This is different from red tide, another type of toxic algal bloom.)
The releases were necessary because an old fear had returned. Engineers realized a few decades ago that Hoover Dike, notoriously leaky, was in danger of collapsing once again if water levels climbed too high. Today, tens of thousands of people live in Okeechobee’s flood path.
An 18-year, $1.5 billion dike-fortification project was completed last January. That probably means fewer algae releases toward Fort Myers and Stuart.
But nobody thinks Okeechobee’s problems are solved. Not only does climate change increase the risk of heavier rain in the future, but water can already flow into Okeechobee about six times faster than the canals can carry it away.
That’s why high lake levels so early in the rainy season are worrisome. In the mid-2000s, for example, a particularly rainy period raised Okeechobee’s level by about four feet in just a month.
The Army Corps of Engineers said it is doing its best to protect the ecological health of the peninsula, the people who live downstream and the farmers. “While I can’t promise that there won’t be high releases later this year due to the inherent uncertainty of Mother Nature, we will do our best to avoid them, if possible,” Col. James Booth of the corps said in June.
A Manhattan-size project
Re-engineering the lake created a sugar cane kingdom . This winter the corps moved ahead with a Manhattan-size reservoir and wetlands complex. A decade or so from now, a 37-foot-high wall — holding back the new lake — will tower over sugar cane country.
The idea is that the reservoir will capture at least some of Okeechobee’s toxic outflows instead of sending them to the coasts. The 10,500-acre reservoir and the recently completed 6,500-acre artificial wetlands, designed to absorb phosphorus, are the centerpiece of a growing system of canals, gates, pumps and engineered wetlands built to clean the outflows so they can once again drift south into the Everglades as well as provide drinking water to booming South Florida. The two projects will cost roughly $4 billion.
During a recent visit to the site, Tim Harper, an engineer with the South Florida Water Management District, parked his pickup and asked his passengers to take in the endless sea of sugar cane that will one day be lake bottom. “Now, imagine 23 feet of water above you,” he said, “essentially for as far as the eye can see.”
It’s a difficult picture to conjure.
Equally challenging to grasp is the idea that the whole new lake, as big as it sounds, will fill to capacity if only six inches of Lake Okeechobee is sent its way.
An earlier proposal for a 60,000-acre system was scuttled when agricultural operators, primarily sugar cane growers, objected. Obtaining the land through eminent domain wasn’t an option after the Florida Legislature in 2017 prohibited allowing the state to force a sale.
Fields of sugar cane dominate the landscape south of Lake Okeechobee.
The lock and dam that feed the canal, which sometimes carries toxins toward Stuart.
Scaling back the reservoir has required drastically increasing its depth. The corps says it will still be big and stout enough to trap and treat a significant amount of the contaminated waters.
The project has the support of President Biden and Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 Republican presidential hopeful.
Many conservationists welcomed the decision to build a smaller reservoir as a major step in the right direction. “No project will play a bigger role in reducing algae-causing discharges from Lake Okeechobee,” said the chief executive of the Everglades Foundation, Eric Eikenberg.
Others are skeptical.
Bill Mitsch, retired director of the Everglades Wetland Research Park at Florida Gulf Coast University, sees the project as too small. He worries it may even result in harm to the Everglades if the phosphorus-absorbing wetlands don’t work as well as predicted. “There is just not enough capacity,” he said.
Ms. Samples, of the Friends of the Everglades, shares that concern. “Florida has this century-long history of trying to out-engineer Mother Nature and having it backfire, and it really feels like we’re repeating the mistakes of our past,” she said.
A new normal
A late June bloom, lapping the shore.
June 11 was a Sunday — a boat day — near Stuart on the coast. A flotilla of Floridians landed on a sandbank a couple of miles offshore and soaked up sun and drinks in thigh-deep waters.
Some talked about how thrilled they were to see native seagrass making a comeback since it was ravaged five summers ago by Okeechobee toxic outflows. The grasses provide fish habitat as well as essential food for beloved manatees, which are in such a desperate condition that government crews have taken to feeding them romaine lettuce.
Stefani Hughes, a real estate agent, remembered 2018’s outflows for the damage not just to the ecology, but to the economy as well. “I personally lost a $1 million sale watching the green plume come in,” she said.
Conservationists say state rules to control the flow of phosphorus from agricultural lands, by far the largest source of the pollutant, have long been poorly enforced. Yet even if fertilizer runoff stopped tomorrow, the algae threat would persist for decades or more because there is already so much phosphorus tied up in cropland soils and lake sediment.
This is one reason the path forward has included building the new reservoir and investing in phosphorus-catching artificial wetlands.
But for the moment, people like Mr. Smart of VoteWater aren’t worried about the next decade. They’re worried about the next several weeks. “Everybody keeps their fingers crossed that we won’t have a rainy summer, and that the toxins that are in the lake, stay in the lake,” he said.
The silhouette of a person standing alone on a pier, casting a fishing line into the water. The rising sun is low on the horizon, and its orange glow is reflected in the water.
=================================================== Dan Egan is the author of “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance” and a journalist in residence at the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.
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