Oyster reef restoration bonus: Mangroves!

Since 2018 my colleague Serge Thomas and I have been helping the City of Naples, Florida monitor three oyster restoration sites in Naples Bay. The project has been really successful in terms of oysters. They have colonized the constructed reefs at such high density that the original construction material (limestone rock and fossil shell) is now completely obscured by a spiky layer of living oysters. 

The concrete igloo things are called reef balls. At this site they are used as breakwaters to protect the rock pile reefs behind them from being eroded by boat wakes, which is a big problem for natural reefs in Naples Bay.

A bonus of the restoration is that the upper parts of many of the constructed reefs have been colonized by mangroves. Mangroves are tropical trees that grow in salt water and are helpful for protecting coastline from hurricanes, providing fish and wildlife habitat, and performing various other "ecosystem services" valuable to nature and humanity. 

Today I kayaked to two of the reefs with my undergraduate research students to count and measure the mangroves. Most were red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle), but we also saw black mangroves (Avicennia germinans), and white mangroves (Laguncularia racemosa). The site constructed last year had just small mangroves, freshly sprouted from the floating seedlings called propagules, while the site constructed seven years ago had substantial saplings with some over a meter high. 

Here my students are doing the official FGCU hand gesture, which is called "wings up" because our mascot is the bald eagle.

The students will analyze their data in more detail to try to figure out the patterns, like why some areas within the restoration site had tons of mangroves and others had relatively few. We hope this work will inform and inspire other restoration practitioners.

PS- If you have Florida waterfront, please let mangroves and other plants colonize and grow along the shoreline. In addition to providing myriad benefits to nature they will help protect your property from erosion.

Venn Diagram of People into Environmentalism

It's tricky to be an environmentalist because a lot of times your allies, who agree with you that the environment needs to be protected, wildly disagree with you about other things. I don't have the solution for this but I've tried to map out the problem with this Venn diagram.

Red Tide is back in SW Florida

My title is a bit misleading. Florida red tide (blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate alga Karenia brevis) has actually been skulking around west and southwest Florida since last summer. But because of the wind and current patterns it has mostly stayed to our north and offshore... until now.

Karenia brevis blooms are tricky to understand and predict because they usually start far offshore, fueled by nutrients from deep water currents that brush along the "continental shelf" of west Florida. But when winds and currents bring the blooms closer to shore, they interact with nutrient sources from the land; the flow from polluted rivers and runoff. There is a growing scientific consensus that while Florida's red tides may not be *initiated* by pollution, they are definitely worsened by pollution.

As paddleboarding marine biologist I'm out in the water a lot, so I get a lot of reminders of what's at stake; what we have to lose if we don't get our pollution under control and tamp down these red tides. For example, last week when paddleboarding around Lover's Key the water was relatively clear and I saw a cute little bonnethead shark swimming along over the sand. Today, paddling the same route with a friend, there were dead fish floating everywhere and a stench was in the air; a mix of rotting fish and the aerosolized "brevitoxins" of the red tide bloom. When we paddled over the same patch of sand where I'd seen the baby shark last week, there it was again, or another one about the same size, freshly dead.

Why do we empower rich people and weaken democracy?

One thing that limits how much I try to convince people that Donald Trump is an awful person who should never have been given power (yes, I would actually be trying more) is this: It’s so PLAINLY OBVIOUS. Seeing Trump on TV in the 1980s, sneering down at the common people from his gold-plated penthouse, I could instantly tell he was a bad person. I thought everyone, even kids like me, knew this: Good people don’t brag about being rich. The more you brag about being rich the worse a person you probably are, and Donald Trump’s entire personality and career is based on bragging about being rich. He should have been laughed into obscurity, or maybe slightly-pitied-for-his-sad-vanity into obscurity. Instead, millions voted for him to be president.

To Nazi, oops I mean to NOT SEE and reject obvious-bad-guy Trump, the 77,284,118 people who voted for him last year must have an incredibly different way of viewing people and the world than I do. I’m going to speculate about those differences and hopefully maybe get to some kind of useful insight about where our thinking goes astray and how we could do better.

 

Difference #1: We differ in how we think people get rich, and what we think wealth indicates about character. Some people associate wealth with positive traits, some associate it with negative traits, or just luck.

Positive View: Wealth is a sign of____

Hard work

Intelligence/Creativity

Contribution to society; Productivity

Goodness; Being rewarded by God

 

Negative View: Wealth is a sign of____

Selfishness/Stinginess/Greed

Ruthlessness; Willingness to cheat and exploit others

Luck- especially the hereditary luck of being born to rich parents

The advantages of attending elite private schools and colleges and entering the high-society "Good ol' Boys" club

Corruption/Collusion; Benefitting from a political system you’ve twisted in your favor

The various “rich get richer” feedback loops in our economic system

 

I think it’s a combination of these positive and negative things that lead to individual wealth, and the relative amounts of different causes of richness varies from one rich person to the next. Not all rich people are purely evil, is what I’m saying. But generally, I think richness comes more from luck and negative traits than wealthy people would like to admit. I also think we Americans are WAY too gracious in how we think about rich people as noble heroes while denigrating poor people as trash. This kind of thinking, which is encouraged by media owned by rich people for whom its important muffle class grievances, makes it easy for rich people to stay rich and get richer while avoiding criticism for bad behavior.

 

Difference #2: We differ in beliefs about “the government” and “the elites.” A common thing about people who’ve embraced Trump seems to be a super strong belief that government, per se, is bad, and therefore anyone who cheats the government or fights the government is good. The story goes like this: There’s a democrat / deep state “elite” that does not work in the public interest and needs to be destroyed by a strongman like Trump who will then recreate a government that is truly by and for the people… or maybe just reign as a benign dictator. The details of what’s supposed to happen after the strongman destroys the government aren’t very clear, which I wish was a matter of greater concern for his supporters.

I agree that government CAN be bad, and sometimes it’s necessary to resist, reform, or even overthrow the government. However, the democratic governments we form are also our only means of protecting ourselves (everyday people) from being exploited by actual elites- the ultra-wealthy and powerful like Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, etc.

Also, much of the dysfunction of government that gets people upset today is because of how it has been beat up and weakened over the decades by the corruption of big-business influences. Handing the steering wheel of government directly to those big-business influences is not helpful. The GOP’s biggest lie is saying they’re taking power from the elites and giving it to the common people, when actually they’re doing EXACTLY the opposite in such an obvious way that I’m astounded more people don’t see it.

My Open Letter to FL Senator Rick Scott regarding illegal actions by Elon Musk's "DOGE"

 Title: Please protect NSF, EPA, NOAA, etc; oppose illegal actions by "DOGE"

Hi Senator Scott,

As a working citizen, the taxes I pay support a variety of federal programs carefully designed and managed to benefit the public. For example, the mission of the National Science Foundation (NSF) is "To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense."

As a marine biology professor whose work has received support from NSF, NOAA, and the EPA, I have been proud to help these important agencies achieve their missions. My students and colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast University also work hard to do good science and win competitive, merit-based funding support from these agencies, or to work for them as experts. For example, my former student Lisa Rickards (FGCU MS Environmental Science 2018) now works to protect the environment at the EPA. Brondum Krebs (FGCU MS Environmental Science 2022) is working on a NOAA-NCCOS funded project to understand and protect fisheries resources in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary- an amazing coral reef ecosystem off the coast of Texas. Matthew Tillman (FGCU MS Environmental Science 2024) has been accepted into the extremely competitive NOAA Corps officer program and is going through their rigorous basic training, eager to use his science, boating, and diving skills to the benefit of our nation.

Because of their importance to the nation, to me, personally, and to the next generation of scientists who I have helped train, it is extremely upsetting to see these carefully built federal programs being “thrown into the wood chipper” as colorfully stated by unelected “DOGE” head Elon Musk. The reckless and illegal actions of DOGE are not reform and are not in our national interest; they are national self-destruction. The richest man in the world is treating our venerable institutions like a personal piñata; whacking them to pieces and grabbing the spilled loot for himself and his cronies. Unless Musk and DOGE are stopped, quickly, the programs essential to our national well-being will fail spectacularly and millions of Americans like Lisa, Brondum, Matthew, and me, will suffer.

I would also like to point out that while a majority of Floridians voted for you and President Trump, NOBODY voted for Elon Musk. With that in mind, please do whatever is in your power as a Senator to oppose Musk and DOGE.

Thank you,

James G. Douglass, PhD

Estero, Florida

Bluesky account, SUPdate, and new GPS watch

Well, gee. It has been a while since I've made a blog post. Blogs are so "old internet" now. Gears are churning in my mind, though, and I'm thinking that maybe old internet has some advantages over the extremely algorithm-driven, addictive, doom-scrolling-for-profit, orchestrated-and-manipulated-by-oligarchs-aligned-with-fascists disaster that is "new internet." 

Towards that end I've created an account on supposedly-less-worse-than-facebook-and-twitter/X social media platform "bluesky" - https://bsky.app/profile/jamesgdouglass.bsky.social

Bluesky doesn't allow posts more than 300 words, but that could kind of work out if I put long rants and picture-filled posts here on my blog, and just link to them on bluesky. Unlike facebook, I think bluesky doesn't deprioritize posts linking to outside websites. 

As for personal news, I've been working a lot trying to keep up with my teaching and research responsibilities at FGCU and I haven't been able to do as much watersports as I would like. I am still paddleboarding at least once a week, though, and I've changed paddleboards. Unlike the pre-hurricane-Ian days when I lived in a house with a shed and could store lots of toys, I am now limited to what I can store permanently in my 2009 Chrysler Town & Country mini-van, and one 14' SUP board that I store on top of the kitchen cabinets with a little rack system that probably voids the security deposit on the one-bedroom apartment I live in with Rhonda. 

The 14' SUP I originally had on top of the cabinets was a 23" wide Riviera RP raceboard from 2017. It was really beat up and many-times repaired from injuries sustained even prior to 2022's Hurricane Ian. Anyway, I finally decided to give it away after getting frustrated with how much trouble I had staying on it in the rough water 2024 Key West Classic race. After all, I still had a slower but more seaworthy 14'x27.25" Fanatic Falcon 2014 raceboard collecting dust in my buddy Serge's backyard shipping container storage unit. So the Riviera went away and I'm now exclusively using the big red Fanatic, which is also windsurfable, by the way, because of the mast track I installed in it a long time ago. 

My favorite paddle route is circumnavigating Lover's Key. It's an annoyingly long, trafficky drive from where I live now to Lover's Key, but I know I can always get a dirt parking spot there, and it's free. There's a closer place where I can get in the water (the Estero River), but flat water paddling is comparatively boring, and paddling the wide Fanatic in flat water is kind of sad because it's significantly slower than the narrow Riviera was. If I'm in bumpy water or waves I don't notice that.

Anyway, in December I gave myself a little present to help me motivate and track my watersports and other exercise. It's a "Garmin Instinct Solar" GPS watch. The GPS isn't on all the time- just when you turn it on to track an activity, but it has motion sensors and a heart rate sensor that ARE on all the time, so if I want to see what my heart rate was when I was asleep, or something, I can look at that data via a bluetooth wireless connection between the watch and my smartphone. (Kind of creepy, but whatever.) The heart rate monitor in the watch gets what I think is accurate data when I'm jogging, based on what I know my maximum heart rate is from prior monitoring with chest band HR monitors. However, the HR monitor in the watch gives total garbage data during standup paddling. I don't know if it's because of the different wrist motion, or water conductivity, or what. 

I have yet to try using the watch for "intervals" type workouts of the sort I used to use my "SUP Speedcoach" GPS for, but the watch beeps and buzzes every time I complete a mile, so I can glance at my wrist and see how my pace was for each mile paddled or jogged. If anyone else has some tips for getting the most out of this type of wrist GPS for SUP training, I would love to hear those.