Florida sandwich: SUP race between two hurricanes

Fall 2024 schedule:

1. Research and teaching at Florida Gulf Coast University
2. Hurricane Helene
3. Key West Classic paddle race
4. Hurricane Milton
5. Back to research and teaching

Life in Florida is *a lot* sometimes, in both good and bad ways. Rhonda and I have adjusted to the "downsizing" that Hurricane Ian forced on us in fall 2022, moving from a flooded then sold from under us rental house in Bonita Springs to a tiny but cute bedroom apartment in Estero. Positives include:

1. Bicycling a short distance to work and never having to worry about gas or finding a parking place.
2. Power-couple working from home vibes with two desks set up in a single room that is home office, living room, kitchen, and dining room.
3. Easy to walk the dogs within the apartment complex, nice neighbors, and a swimming pool.
4. Being at 5 meters elevation (as opposed to 2 meters) and therefore not having to worry about storm surge or freshwater flooding.
5. Rhonda discovered that there is just enough room over the kitchen cabinets to store my 14' race paddleboard, and we developed an efficient system now for getting it down and out the door, so I can paddle almost as much as I used to again.

There are some negatives, like it's a longer drive to the beach, we have no room for guests and no storage space for hobby stuff, and we can't make our own decisions about the landscaping. We're living well overall, though, and able to progress on some of our life achievement / enjoyment goals. For example, Rhonda is kicking butt with her writing and editing career, going on Disney World trips with her sister and nephew, and I am pursuing some semblance of chaotic balance of research, teaching, environmental activism, and watersports / fitness pursuits. The last month has been a particularly dramatic one, and that is the subject of this post.

It started out fairly normal: teaching and research. Fieldwork for the research has been fun. My colleague Melissa May and I are part of a team working with the Gulf Shellfish Institute to restore hard clams, aka Southern Quahog (Mercenaria campechiensis) by combining seagrass and clam restoration projects. Hard clams used to be ubiquitous in SW Florida, but they were massively overharvested in the 1960s and have been slow to recover, possibly due to loss of spawning stock. We've been diving in shallow waters and scoping out sites that currently have low amounts of clams and seagrass but could potentially be restored. In the picture below some Gulf Shellfish Institute researchers are hamming it up with a few clams we found during a site survey using the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation's research vessel.

The bad stuff started with Hurricane Helene, which we were worried could be a reprisal of Hurricane Ian's devastating effects on our area. Helene was devastating for the "Big Bend" region of Florida between Tampa and Tallahasee, and almost apocalyptic as a "1000 year" freshwater flood event where my parents live in Asheville, NC.

The scariest thing for me about Helene was not being able to get in touch with my parents for days while watching apocalyptic footage of Asheville flooding, and imaginging them swept away in a mudslide somewhere. It turns out they were OK, and were able to evacuate to their beach rental house in South Carolina; an interesting reversal of the usual "head for the hills" thing you're expected to do in a hurricane.

Helene wasn't that bad for us in SW Florida, but it still managed to flood FGCU's Vester Marine Field Station enough that they had to remove drywall from where they had JUST fixed it post-Ian. The surges of Helene (and later Milton) show up well in this log from a water quality sensor deployed at the marine station by FGCU scientists.

Also, Helene flooded my paddle friends Justin and Bill's houses on the Imperial River and derailed their plans to attend the last ever Key West Classic paddleboard race. And it majorly resculpted the beaches and "sanded over" beach parking lots. I feel bad for whoever's cars and trucks these were that didn't get moved out of the Bonita Beach parking lots before the storm.

Some of the old Bonita Springs paddle racing crew were unaffected enough by Helene that we were still able to attend the Key West Classic. I drove down with Cindy Gibson and we met Meg Bosi and John Weinberg there, along with a bunch of other paddle racers from around Florida who we've gotten to know over the years.

Hawaiian style blessing before the 2024 Key West Classic.

For the race I'd been thinking about bringing my WIDE 14x27.25" Fanatic Falcon, but I didn't have the wherewithall to get it out of post-Ian storage at my buddy's house before the mess of Helene. So I ended up going with the beat up 14x23" Riviera RP that lives on top of my cabinets. The narrow Riviera board was perfect for the north side of Key West, where the water was flat in the lee of the south wind, but it was almost impossible to balance on the board on the wickedly choppy south side of Key West, where a residual wind and swell from Helene was bouncing off the cement seawalls. I especially suffered in in the final segment of the race where I kept falling and falling and was eventually passed by my most closely matched competitor Travis Kindt. Almost everyone else was also having balance issues, though, and many stand up paddleboarders ended up sitting down or kneeling on their boards to finish the race. Once the "sitters" were disqualified I actually ended up in third place, after Jake Portwood and Travis Kindt. My time was 3 hours 11 minutes, which is about 45 minutes longer than my best time from years past. Cindy won first place in the 12'6 board class and first place overall for the women, rounding in front of a bunch of younger women on 14' boards.

Jake Portwood first SUP finisher.

Me limping over the finish line.

Cindy Gibson finishing strong.

Meg Bosi.

After the race we ate good food and did a bunch of touristy stuff in Key West. Ernest Hemmingway's house was worth the money and the Key West graveyard, with all kinds of history, flowers and feral chickens and iguanas running amok was neat.

We didn't get much rest after Helene and Key West before the next hurricane loomed: Milton. With a more southerly track than Helene, it looked like it could be extremely bad for us, and maybe a "worst ever" scenario for Tampa Bay. As it was, the track kind of "threaded the needle," coming ashore just south of Tampa Bay and not causing much storm surge there, while being far enough north of my area that our storm surge was only a little bit higher than Helene's was. There were scary tornadoes across the whole state as Milton was approaching, though, for which Rhonda and I had to hide in the bathroom with our dogs. It also flooded FGCU Vester station ABOVE the line where the soggy new drywall had just been removed after Helene. Ugh. Bill and Justin's river houses also flooded again, significantly more so than in Helene, so they are in hell still. Areas north of me but south of Tampa Bay, like Venice and Sarasota, got it worst, with major surge, wind damage, and basically total devastation of the barrier islands and low lying areas.

I know I shouldn't get in the water after hurricanes, since it's like, 90% sewage and toxic waste, but yesterday Cindy and I carefully paddled through the backwaters from Bonita Beach road to Wiggins Pass State Park to check out the scene there. Interestingly, all the ingredients of nature: trees, sand, shells birds, fish, etc. are still there, just in significantly different arrangements. The parking lots of the state park are totally obscured under new sand dunes, and what once were forests are now roots and tree stumps awash in the Gulf of Mexico.

People keep talking about "build back bigger and stronger" but I think we need to be a little careful about how we approach that. In my opinion, we really shouldn't be building stuff that's supposed to last a long time on beaches and barrier islands. These areas move and shift around a lot, even when sea level isn't rising, and sea level IS rising (about 3.57 mm/yr in Fort Myers according to the NOAA gauges there). Besides the upward creep of sea level rise, another thing making us more vulnerable is the increasing temperature and "oceanic heat content" of the Gulf of Mexico, which is like rocket fuel for hurricanes. The gulf has been record hot for the last few years, and was 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal for these last two storms, contributing massively to their convective winds and precipitation. Big, destructive hurricanes won't be hitting us EVERY year, but they're definitely going to be hitting harder and causing more surge and flooding than they did in decades past.

Between Helen and Milton my geology / meteorology colleague Dr. Joanne Muller gave a killer talk about hurricanes and her efforts to account for their changing impacts over time. Proud to be part of a scientific community that is looking at the science and economic impacts of storms with clear eyes.

Dirt roads, parks with hiking / biking trails, simple beach access areas, maybe some campgrounds; those are the only kind of human use things that I think really make sense for beach front and barrier islands of the Gulf.

Does it make sense to harvest and repurpose cyanobacteria blooms in South Florida?

Florida has a lot of problems with harmful algal blooms, due to nutrient pollution from wastewater and runoff; a problem that has grown exponentially along with the state's population. In Florida's lakes and rivers, the worst types of algae blooms are those comprised of toxic cyanobacteria, like the Microcystis aeruginosa currently covering Lake Okeechobee. US Representatives Brian Mast and Byron Donalds, from the east and west sides of South Florida, respectively, are sponsoring a bill that would require the harvest and repurposing of these cyanobacteria blooms. Is this is a good idea? Is it even possible? I have mixed feelings about it. Below is a link to a newspaper article about the bill, and below that is an explanation of what I think about it, which I orginally posted as a long reply-comment on facebook.

https://www.news-press.com/story/news/local/environment/2024/07/12/bill-would-have-corps-skim-cyanobacteria-from-waterways-to-make-biofuel/74205200007/

I'm always glad to see elected officials taking an interest in science and environmental issues. It is encouraging that Rep. Donalds and Mast recognize Florida’s algae bloom problems, the link between excess nutrients and algae blooms, and the potential for removal and repurposing of bloom biomass to help address the underlying problem of excess nutrients. I am concerned, however, that skimming/straining cyanobacteria from the water may be impractical compared with other forms of nutrient removal. I am leery of requiring use of these new technologies before their practicality has been vetted against established methods of nutrient removal that may give more bang for the buck. Muck dredging and mechanical removal of invasive aquatic plants are more proven methods for extracting excess nutrients from natural waterways, and I suspect that in most circumstances they are more cost effective than cyanobacterial skimming.

With regard to the conversion of wild algal biomass to biofuel, it's a neat idea but it's not first in my list of promising green fuel sources. For one thing you need a consistent, highly concentrated supply of algal biomass to feed into the biofuel process, but blooms in nature are spotty, spread out, and expensive to harvest and transport. Growing biofuel algae as part of sewage treatment processes is probably a better bet. In the US our eagerness to support biofuel enterprises has sometimes resulted in questionable decisions about what biofuel enterprises to subsidize. For example, huge federal subsidies to corn agriculture for ethanol biofuel have been good for corn farmers but have probably done more harm than good for the environment, since it takes so much fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel to grow corn. I think the moral of that corn story is we need to be cautious about which green enterprises we support at the federal level. Use of federal funds to support the development and evaluation of environmental technologies is great, but it’s important not to pick one winner prematurely and lock it into federal laws that are hard to reverse.

Finally, our first line of defense against algae blooms should always be tightening measures to prevent nutrients from getting into the water in the first place. Therefore, I would be hesitant to endorse big investments of public funds in nutrient removal projects before similar investments have been made in reducing nutrient loading. There are a lot of septic-sewer conversion projects that need support, a lot of outdated municipal wastewater treatment systems that need upgrades (fixing leaky underground sewer lines, etc.), a lot of agricultural and landscaping practices that need review and revision, a lot of stormwater treatment ponds and wetlands that need to be managed better, etc.

Is $25 million for FGCU water quality study a boon or a boondoggle?

**Update 1 April 2024** Today I talked to a Water School colleague who worked behind the scenes to get this $25 million funding from the state, and I'm convinced now that it will be a positive thing addressing a real research need. It's building on a successful partnership between FGCU's hydrogeology and engineering folks and the statistics / data management company SAS, which specializes in organizing and making sense of massive amounts of data. The partnership started with them putting together data from the Peace River watershed to better understand harmful cyanobacterial blooms and other problems there. The new funding will allow them to extend that approach to other watersheds around the state. Among other things, the project is going to round up all the state's existing data on water quality and make it more accessible to the public through online "dashboards" and such. (A common criticism of Florida's current environmental monitoring programs is that their data is hard for the public to access and use, and it sounds like this new project will partially fix that.) Another goal of the big analysis / synthesis is to better pinpoint the worst pollution sources, and to more strongly connect pollution to its consequences (e.g., harmful algae blooms).

**Original Post 30 April 2024**

The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University, where I work as a professor of marine science, was recently gifted 25 million dollars from the state legislature to fund a “comprehensive water quality study.”

Money for water quality research sounds like a good thing, and assuming we have some freedom to plan the research ourselves, I think we can make good use of it. Nevertheless, there have been some legitimate concerns and criticisms surrounding the gift. I first saw these expressed in social media commentary, then in a pithy editorial by author and journalist Craig Pittman in the Florida Phoenix. https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/21/new-study-of-florida-pollution-just-an-expensive-way-to-delay-cleanup/

The main criticism is that the state already has more than enough information on its water quality problems to start fixing them. Therefore, spending more money on studies is a wasteful distraction; a way for politicians to look like they’re helping the environment while avoiding making any real changes that might inconvenience their polluter and developer buddies. The implication is that it would be better to spend the money on things we know will reduce the pollution problems, like wastewater and stormwater system upgrades, conservation land purchases, etc.

This criticism is fair. Honestly, as much as I appreciate money for studying things, if we are not ALSO allocating serious money and effort to fixing the things we already know are broken then we won't see the changes we need. There’s a lot of precedent for the “commission some experts to study an environmental problem then ignore their advice on how to fix it” thing happening in Florida. For example, a few years ago Governor DeSantis made a “Red Tide Task Force” and a “Blue Green Algae Task Force” to study those problems, but the most important recommendations that the task forces gave have been largely ignored. Specifically, recommendations to address the root causes of the algae blooms (pollution and habitat destruction) have mostly been ignored in favor of “treat the symptoms but not the causes” approaches like dumping chemicals into the rivers to kill the algae. Meanwhile, anti-environment politicians and the polluters backing them have worked ceaselessly to erode Florida’s existing environmental protections, trying to stop grassroots efforts to reduce fertilizer and pesticide spraying, and trying to shrink Florida’s aquatic preserves, for example. Some of their attempted environmental villainy has failed, but some has gotten through.

One of concerns in Pittman’s article is that FGCU is a compromised institution that won't be able to give an unbiased assessment of Florida’s pollution problems. As evidence for this Pittman brings up some dirty laundry that impugns FGCU’s environmentally friendly image:

1) The original sin of the university having been sited on wetlands that weren’t supposed to be developed. This was part of a sketchy exchange of favors between the state and land baron Ben Hill Griffin, which opened the gates to lucrative but environmentally destructive development in eastern Lee County. In my opinion it would have been better to site the university nearer downtown Fort Myers to reinvigorate the walkable downtown, reduce outward sprawl and commuter traffic, etc., but nobody asked me because I was in high school in Washington State in the 1990s when this was happening. As it stands now, FGCU IS built in the middle of wetlands, but we’ve made the most of it by using them for teaching and research about biology, ecology, stormwater engineering, etc. We’re hoping those activities have some positive effects that counterbalance the sin of our placement.

2) How FGCU provided a “soft landing” in the form of a cushy job for Noah Valenstein, the former head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, who worked under environmentally-unfriendly governor Rick Scott and a little bit for his successor Ron DeSantis before exiting amidst environmental crises. I see Valenstein once or twice a year at water school staff meetings. So far, he hasn't done anything to interfere with us doing our jobs and expressing our honest views about the environment... which is quite different from some other recent appointees into Florida’s universities who have clearly had a mission to disrupt them. E.g., conservative activist Christopher Rufo who was installed at the New College of South Florida to purge it of wokeness.

Anyway, back to the water quality study. Can FGCU do an unbiased study of water quality problems in Florida? I think we can. $25 million will send a lot of scientists out sampling a lot of water in a lot of places for a lot of different types of pollution, and those scientists’ analyses and reports are likely to be too numerous, too diverse, and shared in too many ways to be politically micromanaged to be pleasing to polluters. “On the ground” at The Water School we’re a plucky band of scientists and professors who are motivated by deep concern for the environment, love for education, and respect for the practice of ethical science. It is possible for research organizations that receive a lot of funding from special interest groups to develop blind spots when it comes finding and criticizing the effects of pollution linked to those groups, but I don't think this particular funding from the legislature has any strings attached that will keep us from pointing the finger at polluters.

Apocalyptic year for Florida Keys getting more apocalyptic

This has been a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year for Florida Keys ecosystems. This is remarkable not because Florida Keys ecosystems were doing fine until now, but because I honestly didn't think they could get much worse than they already were. Significant declines in Florida Keys reefs started in the 1970s, with pollution, diseases, and extreme weather events knocking out one coral species after another. First, most of the Staghorn and Elkhorn corals, which were essential to the habitat structure of the reefs, died out to white-band disease and other diseases. Then the brain corals, star corals, maze and pillar corals started dying out to other diseases and man-made stresses. By the 2000s the average coverage of live coral on the reef had gone down from over 50% to less than 10%. In 2014, a new coral disease called "stony coral rapid tissue loss disease" (SCTLD) spread from a dredging project near the Port of Miami into the keys, wiping out the survivors of the other diseases and bringing live coral coverage down to less than 5%. Recent geological surveys show that the entire sea bottom structure of the keys has changed. With no living corals to build up reef rock and offset erosion, the once-tall reef structures have been crumbling into flat fields of rubble and sand.

In 2023, a major El Niño on top of many decades of increasing global temperatures due to climate change brought the worst-ever marine heatwave to the Florida Keys. The water temperature exceeded 30 Celsius (the bleaching threshold where corals get stressed and start losing their symbiotic algae), earlier than ever, and reached temperatures higher than ever seen before in the Florida Keys. The killer temperatures lasted until October, which created an enormous "cumulative stress" on the corals (See picture). Even hardy, resilient species like sea fans, fire corals, and finger corals bleached and died, their flesh sloughing off their skeletons like meat from bones in an overcooked stew.

When I took my FGCU Marine Ecology class snorkeling there in October we saw a surreal scene of devastation. Dead but still-standing sea fans were covered in fuzzy algal turf. The few corals still alive were bleached to snow white, fluorescent pink, or yellow (see album).



The one part of the reef ecosystem that still seemed to be OK then was the fish. Even though the corals were dead and dying, the reef fish were still abundant in the no-fishing zones where we snorkeled. Sadly, in November 2023, not long after my class snorkeling trip, the fish in the keys also began to suffer. It was a mysterious ailment dubbed "spinning disease," that caused them to swim in an erratic, disoriented manner. It started happening to all sorts of fish species, from tiny pinfish to huge sharks and rays. The afflicted fish often die. This is particularly disturbing because it's affecting critically endangered species like the smalltooth sawfish. There are thought to be only a few hundred sawfish left in Florida, and more than 20 have already been found dead from this in the keys.



Naturally, people want to know what's causing the spinning disease, so just about every marine biologist and environmental management organization in Florida is trying to figure it out. People have tested for red tide (turns out it's not that), common pollutants like nutrients, pesticides, herbicides, and heavy metals (none of those seem to be much higher than normal), and diseases and parasites (none that we can find so far). Some people have speculated that recent water releases from Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries caused it, but it couldn't have been that because: a) the spinning disease started months before the water releases and b) the water release areas are hundreds of kilometers north of the keys. That's not to say that pollution hasn't caused or contributed to this, though. The Florida Keys have been having problems for years with chronic and recurring sewage leaks and spills, including a broken pipe detected in October 2023 that leaked 106,533 gallons of sewage near the epicenter of the spinning disease on Big Pine Key. The info below on the spill is from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Public Notice of Pollution website, which also has information on thousands of other spills throughout the state.

Incident Location: (link)
Incident Description: During a verification inspection of the low pressure system force mains, the mechanics determined that the low pressure grinder system (LPS) force main was not passing a pressure test. Upon further investigation, staff discovered that the 1 1/4" HDPE force main had been augured through by a contractor while installing a fence post on private property. The force main was repaired, a portion of the fill was excavated and replaced and the area was cleaned up, washed down and lime was applied. Repair is complete and yard is restored.
Wastewater Type: Untreated
Cause: Contractor
Spill Volume: 106,533
Volume Recovered: 25
Waterbodies Impacted: N
Clean-up Status: Complete
Clean-up Actions: Vacuumed/pump truck, Applied lime, Washed down area, Raked and disposed of debris
Agencies Notified: Gary Hardie FDEP, State Watch Office

The continuing influence of sewage leaks and spills on marine water quality in the Florida Keys is indicated by elevated levels of an artificial sweetener called sucralose detected in recent FDEP monitoring. There's no natural source of sucralose, so if you're finding it in the water that means that there are wastewater inputs nearby, or that wastewater was spilled in the past and hasn't fully dispersed.

The other link to man-made pollution is the freakishly hot weather, which is signficantly hotter than normal due to the global problem of carbon dioxide pollution increasing the atmospheric greenhouse effect. In addition to contributing to hotter temperatures via the greenhouse effect, the elevated level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to higher levels of carbonic acid in seawater, lowering its pH. This phenomenon is called "ocean acidification" and has already made the ocean 25% more acidic, on average, than it was 150 years ago. Experiments show that hotter temperatures, more acidic waters, and higher nutrient pollution levels all stress corals individually, and that their combined effects are even worse, hence the post-apocalyptic state that Florida reefs are in now.

Anyway, back to the spinning disease. My FGCU colleague Dr. Michael Parsons, who specializes in studying harmful blooms of microscopic marine algae, has strong suspicions that it's linked to a type of single-celled dinoflagellate algae called Gambierdiscus.

Unlike the Karenia brevis dinoflagellate algae that causes red tide, Gambierdiscus is benthic. Benthic means mostly found on the bottom, growing as an "epiphyte" on seagrass, seaweed, rock, etc. It attaches kind of loosely, though, so if there's a lot on the bottom you'll also find some in water samples. During this spinning disease event, Dr. Parsons has been finding Gambierdiscus at levels 10 to 50 times higher than ever seen before in the keys. Gambierdiscus makes multiple types of neurotoxic chemicals that can harm other marine life, as well as people who eat contaminated seafood. The best-known toxin that Gambierdiscus makes is "ciguatoxin," which accumulates in the marine food chain from small algae-eaters to big predator fish, and can then be passed on to people who eat the fish and develop a serious illness called "ciguatera." The weird thing in this case, though, is that Dr. Parsons and the other harmful algae researchers working in the keys have not been finding much ciguatoxin in these Gambierdiscus or in the affected fish, and there haven't been any reports of people in the keys getting ciguatera from eating the fish. (I still wouldn't recommend eating any seafood from the keys now, though.) With ciguatoxin, you'd also expect it to affect just the species in the food chain that were getting exposed via their diet, and the spinning disease seems to be affecting all species of fish- bottom feeders, plant eaters, predators, planktivores, etc. That is leading Parsons and other to suspect that the spinning disease is caused by one of the OTHER toxins that Gambierdiscus makes- maitotoxin.

Maitotoxin is the one of the deadliest biologically-produced toxins known to science. Unlike ciguatoxin, maitotoxin is water-soluble, so fish can be directly exposed through the water rather than through their diet. The maitotoxin hypothesis is consistent with observations by fishermen in the keys that spinning fish often recover back to normal after 17-25 minutes in a tank with water from an unaffected area. Parsons suggests that rescue tanks could be set up to put some of the most endangered species of fish in to recover, but you'd need a pretty big tank for a 5 meter (16 foot) long smalltooth sawfish. Because the maitoxin molecule is huge and complicated, you need sophisticated equipment to detect and measure it, and not many labs in Florida are capable of doing that. Dr. Allison Robertson at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama is able to do it, though, and she HAS detected maitotoxin in the recent samples Parsons has sent her from the keys. So far we just know that maitotoxin is present in the affected area- not how much there is. Parsons and Robertson are working on more quantitiative analysis now, comparing the concentration of maitotoxin in the spinning-disease area with its concentration in unaffected control areas. If the incidience of spinning disease closely corresponds with the concentration of maitotoxinin the water, and the concentration of maitotoxin in the water closely corresponds with the abundance of Gambierdiscus on the seafloor, that would be strong circumstantial evidence for the maitotoxin theory, which could be confirmed by experimental tests.

If it is maitotoxin produced by Gambierdiscus that is causing this, that will lead to more questions, such as "What's going on in the environment that's causing there to be so much Gambierdiscus and maitotoxin?" and "What can we do to stop it?" As for what's causing the Gambierdiscus increase, we already have a rough hypothesis based on what has been seen with Gambierdiscus in other parts of the world: It increases after man-made and natural disasters that damage reefs. Something about a degraded reef ecosystem seems to create ideal conditions for toxic Gambierdiscus. Maybe it's disruption of the normal microbial and grazer community that keeps Gambierdiscus in balance. Maybe it's increased availability of nutrients, seaweeds, and dead coral skeletons to grow on. Maybe it's all of the above. While we're waiting for more complete answers and the next phases of research, I have some suggestions:

1. Don't eat seafood from the Florida Keys until this is over, unless you're trying to do neurotoxicity experiments on yourself.
2. Get SERIOUS about keeping nutrient pollution out of South Florida waters-
    a. Support wastewater treatment system upgrades, maintenance, and monitoring.
    b. Tell the FDEP to bring the hammer down on those responsible for sewage leaks and spills.
    c. Fertilizer also contributes to nutrient pollution, so stricter fertilizer regulations for the keys could help. If I was king of the keys I'd ban fertilizer year-round with no exceptions for golf courses.
    d. Lobby the state and the feds to complete the everglades restoration projects they've been working on for decades that are supposed to improve the quality of the water passing through the Everglades to the keys.
3. Stop denying that climate change and ocean acidification are happening and start doing your part to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.

Southwest Florida Environmental PSA Videos

Although I'm a marine biologist whose primary research interest is the saltwater environment, I'm a big fan of nature in general, and that includes freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. One of the reasons I care about these land and freshwater environments is because they are incredibly important in the processing of water flow and pollution as it makes its way from the land into the ocean. If the terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems get messed up, the ocean gets messed up, too. That means murky water, algal blooms, and death for all the seagrasses, corals, manatees, sharks etc. that I love, not to mention despoiling of the waters I like to windsurf and paddle on. So I take it very personally when I see dumb things being done on land that I know are going to harm the ocean. A new thing I am trying this summer to help save the environment is filming short public service announcement videos about various Southwest Florida environmental things. I hope they can help increase folks' knowledge and appreciation of our local environment and get them to start doing things differently in ways that will benefit the environment and themselves. I'm posting my first batch of videos here.

Some of the PSAs are simple profiles of particular species of interest:


Others address ecological concepts and managment ideas:


Some are linked to the hot issue of herbicide spraying around lakes and ponds; something I can't stand:

Thoughts on SWFL economy and moving from house to an apartment

One of the indirect consequences of Hurricane Ian was that it motivated my landlord to sell the house in Bonita Springs that my spouse Rhonda and I had been renting and living in since 2012.

Initial rent for the house was reasonable, and it went up just 16% from 2012-2022, which was less than the 29.7% cumulative rate of inflation in the US from 2012-2022 (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com). So we were actually getting a little better deal on rent in 2022 than in 2012. Of course that assumes that university faculty salaries in Florida kept up with inflation over that time period, which they didn't quite do, but since I got promoted from assistant professor to associate professor in 2018 we were alright.

Unfortunately, the less-than-inflation rate of rent increase that we experienced from 2012-2022 was extremely atypical for the area. Every other place in SW Florida was experiencing insanely high rent inflation, like 300% from 2012-2022. I.e., a small house like ours could rent for $2850 (or more) now. This was probably another part of our landlord's motivation to sell.

The first wave of sticker shock hit me when we started searching for a new place and realized the single family homes for rent were all some combination of: A) way too expensive, B) way too far away, and C) not available. So I was like, "Dang, I guess we have to switch down to an apartment." The second wave of sticker shock was realizing that even the single bedroom apartments in our area were a lot more expensive per month than the house had been. So I was like, "Holy moly, I have to pay way more per month AND give up the longboard windsurf and paddleboards that I built my outdoor recreation, exercise, and social routine around for 10 years? YUCK!" The sacrifices Rhonda would be making would be of similar order, including giving up space for visiting family, arts and crafts supplies, writer's library, home office space, etc.

One ray of hope and consolation was the prospect of moving closer to work and reducing my commute to bike-able distance. That was a tough thing, though, since near the FGCU campus you have to pay at least as much for a 1 bedroom apartment as you would pay for a 2 bedroom apartment with a 30 minute commute. There were some fraught negotiation surrounding the size vs. distance tradeoff, amid the stressful labor and expense of filling out endless electronic forms for multiple apartment applications. In the end the smaller but closer apartment won out, and we signed the lease.

Moving was accomplished with a rented Penske truck between the 12th and 15th of December, and the two dogs and two humans that comprise our family unit have now been fully transplanted to the apartment, at "Longitude81" behind Hertz Arena, where the Everblades play hockey. The watersports gear I didn't sell is convalescing at friends' houses- the 14' Riviera paddleboard in my old neighborhood, and the 14' Fanatic paddleboard and 11'8 Exocet Windsup in a colleague's backyard storage unit. I've so far made one trip back to the old neighborhood to paddle the Riviera, and one trip to Bunche Beach in Fort Myers to windsurf with the shortboard that now lives permanently in my minivan. So it looks like I will preserve my watersports hobbies in some form, but to get enough exercise I'm also going to have to jog and use the little gym room at the apartment complex.

One thing that's on my list to do is figure out exactly what watersports I can do at the lake on the FGCU campus, and when I can do them without getting hassled by the campus cops. Around two years ago I was getting a pretty good routine going of hydrofoil windsurfing on the FGCU lake, but then a campus police officer told me I could only do it when the lifeguards were on station at the lakefront, which I think rules out the after-work sessions I was getting. BEGIN BEACH ACCESS RANT: Beach and lake access in SW Florida was getting really difficult even before the storm. We've got miles of near-empty private beaches for rich people to look at from their mansions or condos, but not nearly enough public beach parking to accommodate inland residents and tourists. The post-hurricane closures of almost all the beaches in Lee County and North Collier County, combined with pathogenic bacteria, red tide fish kills, etc. has made the beach access situation even worse, of course. My partial solution would be to condemn the destroyed beachfront lots and let them be public parking areas but that would be anethema to the pro-privitization ethos of area leaders.

Ok, how do I wrap this up? I'm moving forward with all the optimism I can muster, but struggling with the demoralizing effects of current circumstances. I'm getting more politically charged against the rich-take-all, screw-the-environment, damn-the-poor economic trend that seems to have taken hold of the world, and particularly this peninsular state, as its effects are becoming more and more invasive in my life and the lives of my colleagues, friends, and neighbors. That anger is tempered somewhat by reminding myself that living more simply and eliminating my car commute is a good thing for the planet that I probably should have done anyway, and I still have the really important essentials like safe shelter and a beloved partner to share it with.

Post-Hurricane downsizing stuff for sale, from windsurfs to lawnmower

UPDATE: Got rid of everything except the 9.5 Ezzy sail, mast, and boom.

One of the consequences of Hurricane Ian, which is something that was going to happen eventually anyway, is that my landlord decided to sell the house we rent. We have to leave before 31 Jan 2023. Because prices in the area have more than doubled since we moved down in 2012 I can no longer afford to rent a house within a sane commuting distance from Florida Gulf Coast University and I will have to rent an apartment. Therefore I need to sell lots of things that I can't use or have no room to store in an apartment. Please contact me if you want to buy any of these things. I'm not going to ship any of them, so you'll need to come fetch them from Bonita Springs.

Generac GP6500 Generator- $600 obo. We got it new for $950 after the hurricane and it has barely been used. I'll throw in a high voltage extension cord and a couple gas cans for free. If you're a Floridian who lives in a house you should have one of these.

Hisense Dehumidifiers (2), medium sized- $100. Two nice dehumidifiers only used for couple weeks after the hurricane. They were $175 new. Good for keeping humidity low to kill mold, dust mites, etc.

Hisense Dehumidifier (1), large sized- $150. Nice, powerful dehumidifier with a indicator that tells you the relative humidity in your house, only used for a couple weeks after the hurricane. Was $240 new.

Kenmore Gas Grill- $120 obo. Convenient outdoor grill with 3 adjustable burners, side trays, propane tank with propane in it, etc. Has a canvas cover but there's a small rip in the cover.

Nelo 560 Surfski Kayak with Braca IV 705 carbon fiber paddle and normal and weedless rudders- $1000. This is a very fast elite ocean racing kayak for an experienced paddler or someone willing to put in the time to develop the balance for it. It's 18'4" long. The paddle was a two-piece adjustable but it's now stuck in the 0 degrees feather 210 cm extension position I always used it in.

Formula / foil windsurfing board and 70 cm fin- $200 obo. Exocet Turbo Formula II formula windsurfing board with fin, footstraps, and reinforced finbox so you can put a hydrofoil on it. (I am not selling the foil; just the board and a standard 70 cm fin.) Board is 155 liters, 100 cm wide x 230 cm long. Has some patches and stuff but it's still very light and watertight. Perfect for getting into foiling, or just regular light wind shortboard windsurfing. Foils are expensive, but the board doesn't have to be.


Ezzy Cheetah 9.5 msq windsurfing sail with Sailworks carbon SDM mast, Neil Pryde Carbon Fiber formula boom, adjustable outhaul, chinook aluminum SDM base extension- $600. This is a good packaged deal because normally the sail or carbon boom alone would cost way more than this. If you want to buy just some of the individual components let me know and we can figure out a price. Here's a link to the Ezzy sail- https://www.ezzy.com/2012-sails/ezzy-cheetah/


Gaastra Nitro V 11.0 msq windsurfing sail with 550 cm carbon fiber mast. FREE. This huge sail is kind of a white elephant now that formula windsurf racing has died, but maybe someone would still want it to play with, or recut as a foil racing sail or something.


Yard Machines gas powered lawnmower- $60. It's a lawnmower. It works. It doesn't have the bag attachment anymore so it's only good as a mulching mower (leaves the clippings on the grass). I'll throw in a small gas can with it.

HDX shop fan- Free. It's a little rusty from living in our lanai for years but it's a powerful fan that works.

RIGID Shopvac, Medium sized, 5.0 peak HP- $50. I bought this for sucking up the drywall dust when I had to take the wet drywall out of the house we rent. Works great and includes an add-on muffler and some other extra attachments that we bought for it beyond just what it comes with from HomeDepot.