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Commercial
fishermen along the Southwest Florida coast are reporting a
massive dead zone that is almost devoid of marine life in an area
of the Gulf of Mexico traditionally known as a rich fishing
ground. They've dubbed it black water, and they're demanding that
local, state and national government agencies find out what's
causing it.
Scientists who have
heard of the phenomenon say they, too, need answers. "It's
killed a lot of the bottom because recently a lot of little bottom
plants are coming to the surface dead and rotten out in the
Gulf," said Tim Daniels, 58, a Marathon Key fish-spotting
pilot who has been flying over the Gulf for more than 20 years.
Like Daniels,
fishermen with decades on the water say they've often seen red
tide but they've never seen anything like this — it doesn't have
a foul smell, it isn't red tide and it isn't oil. They describe it
as viscous and slimy water with what looks like spider webs in it.
First sighted in
January, the mass of black-colored water reached from 20 miles
north of Marathon Key halfway to Naples. It stretched west almost
20 miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen don't know if it's
moved in from the north or offshore or if it originated in the
coastal waters off Southwest Florida. Though somewhat smaller now
than descriptions from January, the mass of water that is still
quite large is moving into the Florida Keys National Marine
Sanctuary.
Created by Congress
in 1990, the 2,800-square-mile Sanctuary adjacent to the Keys is
the largest coral reef in the United States. It includes the
productive waters of Florida Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and the
Atlantic Ocean. Part of the ecosystem is an extensive nursery,
feeding and breeding ground that supports a variety of marine
species and a multimillion-dollar fishing industry that brings in
almost 20 million pounds of seafood each year.
Billy Causey,
superintendent of the Sanctuary, told the Naples Daily News
recently that there is real concern in the scientific community
about the overall health of the Gulf. Causey said contributing to
the problems afflicting the shallow body is global warming,
extended periods when the Gulf waters aren't cooling in the
winter, and the growing impact of human activity along coastlines.
"What we're
seeing is part of a bigger picture," Causey said. "We're
seeing accelerated problems around periods of elevated
temperatures."
Those problems,
beginning in the early 1980s, include more frequent and longer
lasting coral bleaching events that by 1990 were affecting stouter
coral reefs closer to shore and more adapted to wide temperature
swings. "There are places that are still beautiful but the
shallow reefs would make you cry," said Causey, a Keys diver
since the 1950s.
Scientists with
Mote Marine Laboratory based in Sarasota said they are aware of
the black water phenomenon but hadn't yet been able to test water
samples. Erich Bartels, staff biologist at the Lab's Center for
Tropical Research in the Keys, said he'd only seen samples too old
for testing that were brought in by crabbers. "If you held it
up to the light, it had a blackish tint to it," he said.
"...If you have black water, there is something going on.
It's some kind of dead zone. We just don't know. We're trying to
get samples."
Mote is willing to
send out testing kits to fishermen who might encounter the black
water zone, but Bartels said in the absence of a kit, fishermen
could put a sample in a clean bottle and keep it in a cool, dark
place until they could get it to a lab.
Karen Steidinger,
senior biology research scientist for the Florida Marine Research
Institute in St. Petersburg, said she hadn't yet heard about the
phenomenon. She said there's a summer release of brown water from
the Shark River about 35 miles south of Marco Island, but she
doubted the black water was that. The description relayed to her
from fishermen didn't allow her to speculate on a cause.
Steidinger said samples of the water that had been properly
handled would provide the best answer.
Black
water surfaces
Daniels said he
first noticed the black water when he went out in mid-January,
ahead of kingfish season, to see what fishermen had in store for
2002. When he was flying over water that was 50 feet deep and
north of the Keys, Daniels began to notice a change in the water
color.
"I thought,
'What in the world is going on here?"' Daniels said. "I
went out to the northwest and it was solid black. And I went to
the west to get off of it — out to 70 or 80 feet of water north
of the Marquesas (Islands) — and it was still there. I came back
in and turned north of Key West and it went north. (More than)
halfway to Naples from Key West, it was black across the whole
place."
Although there are
almost no fish in the zone, Daniels said, the few that fishermen
found there — and other fish that entered the water — reacted
strangely.
"You'd see
them here and there, but they were jumping and running, not
stopping — and acting different," Daniels said. "Like
they didn't want to be there." Other pilots and fishermen
report the same.
Mike Richardson,
based out of Everglades City, has been fish-spotting for 25 of his
50 years and said next to the normally green water, the black
water stands out like night versus day. He's quit flying over it.
"There's no sense going into it," he said. "You
can't see anything." He hasn't seen dead fish in the water,
though there have been numerous large fish kills in recent months
off Southwest Florida. Most, according to the Florida Marine
Research Institute, have been attributed to red tide — a
naturally occurring microscopic organism in the water.
Fishermen like
Howie Grimm, 42, who has been in the business out of Everglades
City since he was 15, insist the black water isn't red tide.
"It's something totally different from anything I've
seen," Grimm said. "We have to figure out what it is.
There's no fish in it. It's like dead water." Richardson,
too, has seen plenty of red tide, whose origins are still not
fully understood by scientists.
"This is not
like anything I've ever seen," he said.
When pilots from
the air see boats move through a red tide zone, they often cut the
reddish or brownish water to reveal green below. That doesn't
occur in the black water. "This (dark) stuff goes all the way
to the bottom," Richardson said. Boats that have 4 to 5 feet
of hull below the surface cut through 35 to 40 feet of water and
leave nothing but the same black water in their wakes. It's the
same at depths of 15 feet, he said.
"It didn't
matter where they ran through it, nothing left a trail,"
Richardson said.
Grimm has reported
the phenomenon to officials from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, but said he hasn't heard back yet.
That it's affected the fishery, commercial fishermen have no
doubt. "I've net-fished for mackerel all my life,"
Daniels said. "This is the first year that we haven't caught
one Spanish mackerel in the Marathon area. They're not
there."
The southeast
corner of Florida Bay, an area flushed by Atlantic waters, is the
only place fishermen are catching mackerel, and they're doing it
with hooks and lines, he said.
Symptoms
of a sick Gulf?
Along with the
newly discovered black water and coral bleaching, there have been
other problems with the Gulf that have been documented for years.
They include a New Jersey-sized dead zone coming off the
Mississippi River outlet to the Gulf that consumes a larger area
each summer. There are incidences of a contamination known as
fibro papiloma in green turtles that live in Florida Bay. And now
fishermen from Fort Myers Beach to the Keys wonder if there might
be new problems to worry about.
They said there
have been bigger fish kills that aren't making it onto government
reports. The largest, many say, occurred late last year about 30
miles off Tampa Bay. It had shrimpers pulling up netloads of dead
and decaying fish off the bottom, they said.
Some shrimpers
based on Fort Myers Beach worry that a recent and unexplained slew
of flesh-destroying infections they've seen among their number may
be related to problems in the Gulf.
The infection is
diagnosed as cellulitis in three of their medical reports. They
say it begins with a blister on the skin but swells to a large
nodule before it erupts and then spreads. It can only be treated
with stout antibiotics. It was mentioned by fisherman David
Wellsley on CenterPoint, a 7 a.m. Sunday radio talk show hosted by
Gary Burris and Ralf Brooks on WNOG-AM 1200 and 1270. Dan Basta,
director of the National Marine Sanctuary program, will be the
guest today, along with pilot Daniels, discussing the black water
phenomenon as well as other problems with the Gulf.
Two of the Fort
Myers Beach fishermen who suffered the infections are Kevin
Flanaghan, who nearly lost his foot, and Willie Sherwood. They
work for different fleets; both run out of Fort Myers Beach. Both
of them and others say there is fear among laborers in their line
of work about the infection that seems to follow cuts doused with
waters from the Gulf. Many report taking precautions such as
bleaching their gear and washing up with heavy-duty anti-bacterial
soap after pulling in their nets.
The fishermen
contend it's a new phenomenon. But some boat owners and local
health officials speculated that the fishermen's compromising way
of life — the drinking, long-term exposure to the sun's
ultraviolet rays and weeks at sea when they are never dry — is
the culprit for their infections. The men won't lie about their
lifestyles. They admit living from paycheck to paycheck, partying
and drinking — then cleaning up for the most part when they're
at sea. They call it coming off the hill. They'll work for 20 days
or more catching fish — and then spend the money they earn in a
few days ashore. But they also say folks in their line of work
have been doing that for decades without the fear of this sort of
infection.
Ray Hoggard, 49, is
among the many who say the infection is a hot topic. "It's
common talk on the ship-to-ship radios," he said. A few times
in recent weeks, boats have had to bring in for treatment some men
who were stricken. "It's a hell of a coincidence or
something's up," Hoggard said.
Grant Erickson, 48,
owner of Fort Myers' Erickson and Jensen Seafood, has a fleet of
eight boats. He said he, too, hadn't seen the likes of these
infections in the business that his family has been in for a
half-century. "It seems like there's something on the bottom
... these boats (nets) drag the bottom," he said. "I
don't think it's the lifestyle of the fishermen that's changed. If
anything it's better than years past. There's nothing new except
the infections."
Dr. Mark Brown, an
infectious disease specialist in Naples, said without seeing and
testing the infections there is no way to identify the organism or
organisms that caused them. He said the next logical step would be
for someone to do an epidemiological study of the fishermen to
compare them to a control group to find out what's causing the
infections. Unless doctors are culturing the bug to see what it
is, they may never find out, Brown said. "They need to find
out if they all have the same bug," Brown said. "They're
going to have to try harder to make a microbiological diagnosis of
what germ is causing this. . . They may not even be looking."
Health officials
from Lee County, where the affected fisherman are based, said they
investigate any of more than 70 communicable diseases and any odd
health-related occurrence. "We need to gather a lot of
information," said Dr. Judith Hartner, director of the Lee
County Health Department. "The first step is somebody needs
to report it."
Three doctors
who've seen the affected men said they didn't culture the organism
that caused the infection. Brown said the symptoms of the
infection — the swelling, fast pace and flesh-destroying nature
as reported by the fishermen — sounds like Vibrio vulnificus, a
common seagoing organism. However, he didn't speculate on why or
if it might be on the rise among fishermen.
According to a
Johns Hopkins University Web site, the bug frequents areas where
the water temperature remains high throughout the year and are
most abundant in summer. The infection progresses at a rapid pace
and can be fatal. Hartner said her agency needs to answer a number
of questions before deciding if the infections warrant
investigation.
"Do the
fishermen think it's unusual?" she asked. "If we do an
investigation and we find out the cause, is there anything we can
do to prevent it? We don't know that it's on the rise. It could be
coincidence."
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