Manatees to oysters; school's out fieldwork blitz in SW Florida

I finished my spring semester grading on Sunday night then woke up at 6 am Monday to begin four consecutive days of benthic ecology fieldwork in the Caloosahatchee River Estuary (CRE) and Pine Island Sound (PIS). Here's a little about the projects:

CRE- Caloosahatchee means "river of the Calusa;" named after the people who lived in SW Florida prior to Spanish and English colonization. The original headwaters of the Caloosahatchee were west of Lake Okeechobee, but in the 1880s a canal was constructed to extend the river to the lake itself. This seemed like a good idea at the time, providing a highway for steamboat traffic and a mechanism for controlling lake level to allow more farming around its shores. Three locks and dams were also added to the Caloosahatchee to retain or release water as needed for human use, turning the river into a linear reservoir. Ecologically it was a disaster, of course, because it starved the Everglades of water and turned the relatively clean, steady flow of the Caloosahatchee into a wildly fluctuating, polluted flow.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the first dam on the river, life in the CRE now suffers from salinity levels that flip-flop between high and low extremes beyond the natural variability of an estuary. (I wrote a paper about that with some other scientists in 2020.) In recent decades we have tried to regulate the flow to better meet both nature's needs and human needs as part of the massive "Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan" (CERP). The latest Lake Okeechobee Systems Operating Manual (LOSOM), integral to CERP, is better at keeping water flows to the estuary within ecologically reasonable bounds. It's not perfect, though, and in high rainfall times or droughts like we're having now the estuary still gets too fresh or too salty.



The best "ecological indicator" of the estuary getting too salty is loss of the Tape Grass (Vallisneria neotropicalis) beds that used to cover large areas of the upper estuary. Vallisneria is a freshwater plant but can tolerate salinity levels up to about 10 ppt (pure freshwater is 0 ppt and the ocean is 35 ppt). So the upper parts of estuaries are OK for it. We want Vallisneria growing in the CRE because it provides food for wintering manatees and habitat for fish and crustaceans. It also helps absorb some of the excess nitrogen and phosphorus getting into the estuary from urban and agricultural pollution, and benefits seaward habitats like seagrass beds by preventing algae blooms. (My grad student Brondum Krebs and I wrote a paper about that in 2024.)

Picture of extensive Vallisneria beds in the CRE in 1984, taken by Calusa Waterkeeper emeritus John Cassani.

There have been various governmental and non-profit environmental group efforts in the 2000s to restore the mostly-lost Vallisneria beds, including an ambitious planting effort begun in 2024 using cages to protect the plants from grazing while they're getting established. Seagrasses (and their freshwater kin like Vallisneria) often experience "positive density dependence" in stressful environments, meaning they flourish when there's enough of them around that they can stabilize the local environment and resist grazing, but if they fall below that self-sustaining threshold it's really hard to get them back. Getting them back may require both a big reduction in the environmental stresses and active measures like planting. The 2025-2026 drought in Florida has greatly worsened the salinity stress on naturally recovering and recently replanted Vallisneria in the CRE. This week we were encouraged to see SOME Vallisneria still living in the CRE restoration areas that we monitored, but there was much less than there had been just 6 months ago.

A Vallisneria hanger-on.

There were also some upsetting signs of trouble in the upper estuary such as:

1. A huge, rotting manatee carcass in one of our monitoring sites. This may be a late casualty of the February power plant snafu that cut off the warm water flow that manatees were sheltering in on the Orange River, a tributary of the upper CRE. Or it migth have been a boat strike, since the seasonal speed limit for boats expired on March 31st but some manatees are still hanging out in the upper CRE. I'm not sure what the manatees are still doing up there because there's very little Vallisneria for them to feed on. They might be eating the filamentous red algae Polysiphonia subtilissima, which is abundant in the upper estuary due to the nutrient polluted conditions. Compared to true plants like seagrasses and Vallisneria, algae are thought to be an inferior food for manatees, so this is a little worrying.

2. Oysters, Crassostrea virginica, far further up the estuary than I've ever seen them before. Oysters prefer water of 14-28 ppt so they're usually in the middle to lower part of the estuary, rarely even making it as far up as downtown Fort Myers. This week we actually found a couple of oysters upriver of the railroad bridge and "Beautiful Island" water quality sensor maintained by the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF).

Oysters cement their shells to whatever hard substrate is available. In the upper CRE the hard substrate is shells of Rangia cuneata and Polymesoda caroliniana clams, which are normally the dominant bivalves in that low salinity zone.

Over the last 90 days the SCCF sensor has shown salinities near and sometimes exceeding 10 ppt, which is really bad for Vallisneria. A lot of the Vallisneria restoration areas and former strongholds are well seaward of Beautiful Island and have surely experienced even higher salinities this year.

What should we make of this? Should we give up on trying to restore Vallisneria in the Caloosahatchee, since climate change, sea level rise (about 30 cm [1 ft] since 1965), and increasing human demands for fresh water are going to make it even harder to maintain low salinities in the future? We need to be realistic, but I don't think we should give up yet. A huge reservoir (the C-43 reservoir) has recently been built upriver on the Caloosahatchee to store water in wet times and gradually release it in dry times. We didn't need that kind of artificial thing back in the day because natural wetlands in the watershed would store and slowly release water to the river. However, our drainage of the wetlands with canals, and other watershed modifications like pavement and rooftops that prevent groundwater recharge have made it necessary. Once it's full, the C-43 reservoir should at least buy us a couple decades of keeping the seawater at bay and maintaining a low salinity Vallisneria habitat.

There is the issue of the water in the C-43 reservoir possibly becoming a polluted soup of algae unsafe for release, since it's built on top of defunct orange groves with fertilizer-saturated soils and doesn't include any artificial wetland features for nutrient removal. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess. I like the idea of having some kind of floating aquatic plant harvesting system in the reservoir to sponge up and repurpose the excess nutrients until the water is clean. Another thing we should be working on for the real long term is an inland retreat for the Vallisneria, because at some point sea level rise is just going to be too much to keep it growing where it's hanging on now. That inland retreat thing is something that both humans and plants will be going through in the next couple centuries.



PIS- Pine Island Sound, in contrast with the beleaguered pollution-highway that is the main stem of the Caloosahatchee Estuary, is the healthiest estuary in SW Florida. This is because its watershed is relatively sparsely populated barrier islands with decent pollution controls, it has good connections to the Gulf of Mexico through tidal inlets, and only gets a moderate amount of spillover pollution from the more inland estuaries like the Caloosahatchee and Matlacha Pass. PIS is not perfectly healthy, though. For example, it lost its Bay Scallop population after the construction of the Sanibel Island causeway bridge, which reduced flushing of the estuary and caused it to take on more gunky Caloosahatchee water. From north to south Pine Island sound you can see a definite transition in water color from Caribbean blue-green to more Caloosahatchee brown.



The reason I was in PIS on Thursday was to help with "ground truthing" for a seagrass mapping effort led by the South Florida Water Management District. A few months ago a contractor for the SFWMD flew over all the SW Florida estuaries aquiring detailed imagery for seagrass delineation. This is an important effort that's repeated every few years to track seagrass gains and losses. It gives us a report card on our environmental stewardship, because seagrass beds expand where water quality and salinity levels are good, and they perish where water quality or salinity levels are bad. I was nervous about the PIS ground truthing because I'm only a so-so boat operator and navigator, and the geography of PIS is a complicated maze of islands, vague channels, and dangerous shoals. To make up for my ineptitude I pre-scrutinized maps of the area and carefully planned a zig-zagging route to hit all the spots I'd been assigned to check. I had sharp crew of FGCU graduate student Alvio Barbaretta and undergrad Bailey Day, who made sure I didn't get lost on the drive to the boat ramp, measured water clarity, punched in coordinates and data, and kept eyes out for hazards of the sea.

This allowed me to focus on the fun stuff like snorkeling around the boat to see what species of seagrasses and algae were present. After three days in the coffee-brown water of the upper CRE with barely any submerged vegetation, the lush seagrass meadows and blue-green water of PIS were wonderful.

We even had a close encounter with LIVE manatee who seemed happy, and very curious about our boat.

Every site we stopped at in PIS had seagrass, though it was sparser at deeper sites (a result of reduced light availability) and it was more algae covered at southern sites (a product of more nutrient pollution) from the Caloosahatchee. As bad as the drought has been for Vallisneria in the upper CRE, it's actually pretty helpful for the saltwater-associated seagrasses in places like PIS, because less river flow and runoff means less delivery of coastal pollution. The beautiful seagrass scenes from Pine Island Sound are not something that we should take for granted, but rather, something that should inspire us to be better stewards of all waterways in Florida.

Tendon u-joints - Windsurfing's weakest link?

The critical piece of hardware that makes windsurfing possible is the "universal joint" or "u-joint." The u-joint attaches the sail to the board but allows it to swivel and lean in any direction. This allows the rider to steer without a rudder and is the fundamental difference between windsurfing and normal sailboat sailing.

Picture from my old post, "Poor Person's Guide to Windsurfing"

The first commerically available windsurfers in the 1970s used clunky wood and metal u-joints. More compact and durable u-joints were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, along with lots of different systems for fitting them to the board and mast base. (Joe Windsurfer has a blog post with pictures of the original wood u-joint and various other weird ones.) However, the u-joints themselves were all variations on two themes: 1) a bendy rubber "hourglass" or 2) a three-axis "mechanical" joint. By the 2000s, "Chinook" and a couple of other brands had more-or-less standardized u-joint and coupling systems, which made it easier to mix and match gear. The rubber hourglass u-joints were the most common type and seemed to work for 5-10 years before cracking and failing.

If the evolution had stopped there we'd be good, but someone had to come up with a "better" "tendon" design that has now mostly replaced the rubber hourglass joints. The tendon is a narrow, rubber-like cylinder that bolts into cups on both sides of the joint. The idea is that you can unbolt and replace the tendon easily without having to replace the longer-lasting parts of the u-joint. The problem is that you have to replace the tendons A LOT. Even the "good" ones don't last as long as the old rubber hourglass joints, and the quality of the replacement tendons on the market seemed to go way down shortly after everyone switched to using tendons. They can fail before showing any obvious signs of wear, even when they're brand new.

I discovered a new low level of tendon performance today when installing a brand-new one (Ruiqas brand, ordered from Amazon - should have gotten one from my local Fort Myers windsurfing shop instead). I was a little suspicious of how the tendon had both bolt-holes in the same direction rather than orthogonal like the Chinook brand tendons. I was more annoyed when realized the ends of the tendon were too long to get the holes in the tendon to match up with the holes in the cups, no matter how hard I tried to jam the parts together. I looked up on the Internet that if that happens you have to cut off material from each end of the tendon using an X-Acto knife until it fits, which I did. It went together, but it seemed way less flexible than the original tendon joint. It snapped when I was positioning the board for a beach start, before I even sailed at all. GRRR. I could see a few little air bubble cavities inside the tendon where it broke through, but I think the real defect wasn't the air bubbles but simply that it was a lousy rubber/plastic formulation that lacked the flexibility and strength to do its job.

I still had one functional u-joint in the van, so the day wasn't a total bust. The wind had gotten too light to use the shortboard that I originally tried on, but I got a good session on my foil board with a 6.8 sail.

Good hydrofoil windsurfing session + pretty dune plants

Hydrofoil windsurfing is great. I'm still using the "Slingshot Infinity 76" hydrofoil that I got in 2019 and first blogged about here. The only difference is that I mount it to a different board now; a Fanatic Skysup. (Boom mount video of me riding the skysup in 2021 here.)

Today's session was at Bonita Beach access #10, which is finally starting to get back to normal after being leveled by Hurricane Ian in 2022 and messed up again by Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024. In just the last couple of weeks the county added some dune plantings, which I have learned from my colleagues at FGCU are VERY effective at gathering windblown sand and reducing beach erosion during storms.

It seems like some plants have also recruited to the dune on their own, like the railroad vine, Ipomoea pes-caprae.

When I arrived at the beach it was quite breezy but I wasn't sure it would be enough to use a 6.8 sail on my shortboard. I went with a 4.7 sail on the foilboard. (The rule of thumb is you use about 2/3 the size of sail for hydrofoil windsurfing as you would use for normal windsurfing.) When you're powered on the foil it's easy to go way upwind and downwind, so that's what I did, making these nice tracks. I crashed a couple times but didn't lose my sunglasses, and I saw a sea turtle, so I'm calling it a win.

Yes life can be hard for men but don't be a jerk

Hello fellow male humans,

I read on the Internet that you’re having a hard time. I believe it because I have been alive since 1979 and even my “successful” life has had lots of internal woe, scrawled across the pages of diaries intermittently kept since high school.  Life is hard in the ways it has always been hard, such as the struggles of family dynamics, school, work, forming friendships, finding romance, finding a deeper meaning, coping with physical and mental illness, and facing inevitable aging and death. However, life is also hard in uniquely modern ways, such as the constant flood of misery, temptation, judgement, and deception delivered through billionaire-owned social media networks to your very addictive mobile computing devices.

Life is hard for women, too. You may not want to hear this, or may not believe it, but it’s even harder for women than it is for you. This is because women face all the timeless and modern hardships listed above, plus additional, serious dangers and hardships from living in still-male-dominated societies. That monologue about women’s plight in the Barbie movie nailed it.

This post isn’t meant to be a debate of who has it harder, and I’m not trying to make you feel worse than you already feel about your male struggles. It’s just important to remember that women are struggling, too, and its often because of us. 

In your defense, there ARE some specific, extra struggles associated with being male. I’m not talking about the risk of testicle injuries (although that is a thing). I’m talking about social and emotional struggles. I want to identify some of those struggles and address how we deal with them. How we deal with them has implications not only for our personal happiness but for whether we affect society positively or negatively. Some specific hazards and hardships of the male circumstance include:

1.     A ridiculous excess of sexual and romantic desire. The male libido hits like a meteor at puberty and burns for decades. It supplies a lot of anxious motivation and not a lot of satisfaction. The desire for romantic love is another burning meteor, though that one at least has a chance of finding a stable orbit. Developing positive, romantic and sexual relationship(s) in real life IS worth working towards, after attending to the even more important things like a roof over your head and a supportive network of friends and family. However, if you’re trying to sculpt your real life to meet 100% of your testicles’ ridiculous desires you’re in great danger of becoming a selfish, awful, tragic person. Chasing too hard after impossible desires can really hurt you, and others. For example, people who leverage money and power and/or deviously manipulate others to meet their desires can end up as monsters like Epstein and Weinstein. In addition to those infamous abusers of power, there are legions of lower-profile predators and creeps who have hurt women, and legions of sad dudes who have hurt themselves by wasting all their money on porn, how-to-be-a-player courses, strip clubs, prostitutes, etc. Don’t let yourself or your bros become those guys. It’s part of the human condition that there will always be a large portion of your desires that just can’t be met, realistically, ethically, or financially. Some combination of acceptance, imagination, and laughing at yourself will get you through.

2.     The sense of entitlement and deficit of responsibility that come from living in a patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a social system where men hold primary power, dominating roles in political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. There are different degrees of patriarchy, but the USA is still strongly patriarchal according to every economic and social thing we can measure. Males get a lot of perks and privileges that women don’t get. For example, expectations for responsibility are MUCH lower for boys and men than they are for girls and women. Cartoon characters illustrate this well. We think boys like Bart Simpson, teenagers like Beavis and Butthead, and men like Homer Simpson are endearingly hilarious in their bad behavior, while their female counterparts Lisa Simpson, Daria Morgendorfer, and Marge Simpson have to be responsible all the time.

Rarely having to clean up our own messes, consider others’ needs, or pay the full price of our transgressions means males in a patriarchy grow up without developing the full responsibility and moral skillsets that all humans should have. Or we’re slow to develop them. We think we’re special good boys and nice guys when actually we’re morally stunted jerks who can’t deal with real life and who put a huge burden on others. We have this immature fantasy that at some point we'll slay a dragon and be adored and in the meantime we can't stoop to do our own laundry or vacuum the floor. That’s the bad edge of the patriarchy sword. Here’s a personal example: I grew up thinking of myself as a super special nice guy who could do no wrong, and I persisted in that view even when I was being selfish and ridiculous in early relationships. This doomed me to hard lessons and delayed social/emotional maturity, and of course it was hard on whoever I was dating.

3.     The toxic competitiveness dynamic. Guys experience weird pressures and expectations from living in societies that over-inflate the importance of male “greatness” and hierarchical position. You’re supposed to be a big hero, or a big stud; the brightest peacock in the flock. Someone is always trying to make you feel bad and insecure for not being man enough, and they’re selling you muscle growth powder, penis enlargers, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. They say it’s not enough just to be a good person and good team player. The message is that 99% of men are worthless, ugly, too-poor, and too-short and wimpy, and you’re going to be miserable and loveless unless you can dominate all the competition and become some kind of warlord pimp Adonis. Now it’s true that there is some disparity in the amount of attention paid to flashy versus average guys, and some women have terrible, superficial tastes in men, just as most men have terrible, superficial tastes in women. It’s also true that there is some real unfairness in terms of the genetic cards we’re dealt, which I addressed in the 2010 post “Ugliness, Fairness, and Happiness.” But the world is not nearly the all-or-nothing, winners-dominate-losers kind of world that the manosphere influencers say it is. The “nice guys finish last” thing is not true. There are many ways that a not-so-flashy guy can find his niche in the world through cooperation, kindness, consistency, etc. You can flavor your niceness with a little pizazz without going to the extremes of being a macho jerk. The natural way to do it is to lean into the things you're good at and see where they lead. I got a lot of mileage out of windsurfing and science as a bachelor, and those are things I liked doing anyways. Compared with the warlord pimp Adonis, who will be hated by most people and likely deposed quickly by the next aspiring warlord pimp Adonis, a humble good guy will develop a stable network of people around him who actually appreciate him and will help and support him as he has helped and supported them. Another reward of developing your goodness rather than striving for greatness (a.k.a. clout), is that it makes a better world for EVERYONE, not just you.

Conclusion: The unfairness of the world is real, but the manosphere’s advice for how you should deal with that unfairness is terrible. Their advice is like, “You have to seize power for yourself by becoming a dominant, aggressive, alpha male. Showing any empathy or kindness towards others will just make you a loser.” Every man competing to be an alpha male, and ignoring essential-to-the-fabric-of-society things like cooperation and niceness, is a recipe for both personal and civilizational disaster. In fact I think idolizing and enabling alpha male types has contributed a lot to the dysfunctional, right-wing, authoritarian oligarchy we have today. For all but a very few well-positioned billionaires and political elites, the optimal strategy for the self is actually to be LESS selfish; to create a fair, egalitarian society through cooperation, niceness, and holding abusers and exploiters to account. Working TOGETHER we can ALL get ahead.

Being anti-war not the same as being pro-dictator

It's interesting, though not surprising, to see Venezuelan and Iranian expatriates cheering the US' capture/killing of their autocratic leaders Maduro and Khamenei, respectively. Should we be cheering, too? Should we be like, "Even though we hate Trump for many other reasons, we can't complain about him beating up other bad guys"? Here's what I think:

It's clear now that the US military has the physical capability to kill or depose the heads of state of these poorer countries, but it's not clear that we have the ability (or even the intention) to set them up with new governance that isn't just as bad, or even worse. Like, are Venezuela and Iran about to become wonderful, free, safe democratic places that their expatriates will be delighted to return to? I'm not holding my breath. In Venezuela the annointed leader post-Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, seems to come from within the same oppressive regime as Maduro, with the only difference being that she's friendlier to US-aligned oil oligarchs than Maduro was. In Iran the defeat of the regime may eventually allow the installation of leaders more pliant to US, Israeli, and Saudi oil oligarch interests... but that seems a far cry from actual democracy that would empower and improve conditions for Iranian people. Plus, that's like the best case scenario for Iran, and worst case scenarios involve chaos of warlords, terrorism, mass civilian deaths by bombings and starvation (like Gaza x 100), etc.

So my current, over-simplified take is that this new batch of wars is bullshit that will benefit a few sociopathic oligarchs while not improving, or even further degrading, the living conditions of millions of people. We need to get our own democracy functioning again in the US so we can have reasoned debate and careful consideration of these things instead of just having a free for all for our dumb dictator oligarchs to "experiment" with trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives.

One thing that might help us with better decision making about wars involving foreign dictators and such would be to consider these general principles:

1. Don't BE a dictator. Obviously very few people are ever in the position to consider the "should I become a dictator or not?" moral question, but if any nascent dictators are reading this blog, yeah, don't do it, bro.
2. Don't support dictators or aspiring dictators in your own country. This means being ACTIVE in nurturing democracy and protecting it from the forces that can undo it, such as runaway corruption and wealth inquality.
3. Don't support dictators in other countries financially, militarily, or otherwise.
4. Don't depose a dictator if you're just going to replace him with another dictator or leave an anarchic mess that's as bad or worse than the dictatorship was.

Norway fighting "enshittification" - I love them for this

One of the best things about a good, working democracy is that it protects normal citizens from being exploited by the rich and powerful. I'm delighted to see Norway's "Consumer Council" trying to protect folks from the insidious exploitation of consumers known as "enshittification." The Norwegian Consumer Council hilariously explains the enshittification phenomenon in this video:



They also have a more serious document proposing solutions to the problem here: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree/

Here in the US we're less protected from enshittificators because the ruling regime of oligarchs is largely made up of enshittificators and has done its best to dismantle opposing elements of the government like our Consumer Financial Protections Bureau. Therefore, fighting enshittification in the US is more of a grass roots resistance thing, where we have to eek out whatever small victories we can. I'm proud to have finally squirmed free of quintessential enshittificator Photobucket but there are a lot of other enshittificators at large that continue to have an undue influence on my life. For example, whenever I play a YouTube video for my marine ecology class its surrounded and interrupted by a vignette of dumb ads. I pledge to redouble my efforts to fight enshittification however I can.

Florida Keys marine ecology fieldtrip photos

Every semester I take my Florida Gulf Coast University Marine Ecology class to the Florida Keys Marine Laboratory for a few days to snorkel and learn about South Florida marine species and habitats. This year we went earlier than usual, but we lucked out with a stretch of warm weather between cold fronts. For the second part of the trip, shark and ray expert Dr. Pilar Blanco joined us, scoping out the venue for future research and teaching trips. That seemed to improve our luck at seeing sharks and rays, including this pair of Nurse Sharks (Ginglymostoma cirratum) snuggling under a ledge at Alligator Reef.

A link to the full album is here- https://photos.app.goo.gl/NbfLxnJPHEyzsMTR6