The stark folly of poisoning a lakeshore (photos)

Next to my apartment complex is a large retention pond (henceforth, "the lake") which captures and processes runoff from the sprawling development around it. The major developments that border the lake are: Hertz Arena (where the ECHL champion Florida Everblades hockey team plays), Waterline Estero apartments (where I live), The Springs at Gulf Coast apartments, the Miromar Outlets mall, and the Interstate 75 highway.



According to satellite imagery on Google Earth, which I can rewind to 1985, there was some sort of waterbody there even the 1980s, though it was surrounded by woods then. My guess is that the lake began as a quarry, maybe related to construction of the interstate, before it was modified into a retention pond. Anyway, that's besides the point. The point is that nowadays it's an urban waterbody with the important jobs of:

1) Controlling flooding

2) Filtering pollution out of runoff water

3) Being something nice for people to look* at so they'll spend more money on rent, shopping, shows at the arena, etc.

*People used to do more than just look at the lake. In the early 2000s they did waterski shows in it, but that stopped before I arrived in SWFL in 2012. Probably for the best, but it's kind of sad they don't even allow fishing in the lake now.

4) Providing some vestige of habitat for plants and animals that are losing a lot of their other "real estate" as urban growth explodes in the area

Despite its burdens, the lake seems to be functioning well. I'm judging this by the fact that compared to other retention ponds in the area the water is surprisingly clear and full of submerged aquatic vegetation and fish. I know this from lots of looking at the lake, and a bit of snorkeling and deploying underwater cameras in it.

The lake's submerged aquatic vegetation, specifically Vallisneria americana, known as tapegrass or eelgrass, is its secret to clear water. The plants absorb excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the polluted runoff, so there's less in the water to fuel algae growth. This works really well, up to a point. If the loading of nutrient pollution becomes too extreme, or something knocks back the plant life, a lake can suddenly shift from plant-dominated with clear water to algae-dominated with murky water. This dynamic is called ASS - Alternative Stable States. For more info see Scheffer, M., Jeppesen, E. (1998). Alternative Stable States. In: Jeppesen, E., Søndergaard, M., Søndergaard, M., Christoffersen, K. (eds) The Structuring Role of Submerged Macrophytes in Lakes. Ecological Studies, vol 131. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0695-8_31

I am nervous about this lake switching from its current, clear-water state into an algae-dominated ASS. The reason I'm nervous is that some parts of its shoreline are being managed very poorly. Specifically, the shoreline along Miromar Outlets and I-75 is being sprayed with herbicide to kill all the shoreline plants, leaving just bare mud and rocks. This video clip and the photos below it show the contrast between a well-managed part of the shoreline in front of The Springs apartments, and the terribly-managed part of the shoreline in front of Miromar Outlets.

Natural shoreline in front of The Springs apartments- Keep up the good work.

Semi-natural shoreline in front of Hertz Arena- They mow and do some "spot" spraying of plants, which I think is unnecessary, but it could be worse.

Herbicide-nuked shoreline in front of Miromar Outlet- Ugly, unsafe, and environmentally atrocious. Tsk tsk.

I assume Miromar is doing this as some misguided attempt to make it look "neat and tidy" because there's no legitimate ecological reason to do it. Here is why they should stop spraying herbicide on the shoreline:

1. It causes shoreline erosion.

2. It leads to more runoff pollution entering the lake. One reason ecologists recommend keeping a generous buffer of littoral and riparian vegetation around urban water bodies is because these plants are very effective at intercepting and removing pollution from runoff.

3. It reduces the abundance and diversity of native plant and animal life- bees, butterflies, birds, frogs, fish, etc.

4. While there might be a perception that nuking the shoreline down to a barren wasteland increases people's safety from alligators, it probably does the opposite, because it invites people to go closer to the water's edge where they're more likely to encounter an alligator. I think if the shoreline is reedy and brushy people are less likely to go down to the water's edge.

CONCLUSION: This lake is a local treasure, but it's in danger of losing its ecological integrity because of foolish management on the outlet mall side. I'll see if I can get in touch in with them and convince them of the error of their ways. If any of you readers know one of the higher-ups at the organization, please let me know.

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.

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

Went to the new MOTE Aquarium in Sarasota

I'm on an advisory council for something called the "Seagrass Restoration Technology Development Initiative." The initiative is funded by the state of Florida and administered through a private organization called Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium. Periodically the group gets together and all the scientists funded by the initiative update the organizers and advisory council on their research activities and findings. Yesterday there was one of those get-togethers at Mote SEA - the organization's fancy new public aquarium at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota. It was neat for lots of reasons:

1. Nathan Benderson Park is a unique and impressive venue for competitive rowing and paddling. I'd been there to compete in "Sup 'n Run" races in 2016 and 2017 and to cheer Robert Norman's 24 hour SUP distance record attempt. I was nostalgic to see the place again.

2. The Mote SEA aquarium wasn't built yet when I did those sup things, but I'd seen the crazy building under construction from the freeway, so I was curious what it was like inside. Here are some pictures-

3. The seagrass science aspect of the meeting was even more interesting (to me) than the public aquarium. I brought my grad student along so she could absorb the latest info on how to characterize genetic diversity and stress-adaptations within seagrass plants. The hope is to use that knowledge to improve seagrass conservation and restoration success. Of course the other, even-more-important part of successful seagrass conservation and restoration is reducing the man-made environmental stressors that have been killing seagrass: nutrient pollution, climate change, coastal hardening and dredge/fill operations, etc. So let's not forget about that.

Learn Marine Ecology: My Narrated PowerPoint Lectures

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic this spring I had to switch from conventional teaching to "online instruction" halfway through the semester at Florida Gulf Coast University. Online instruction is not as efficient, effective, or fun as conventional teaching, but it IS better than nothing. One bonus of producing recorded teaching materials is that I can make them available for free to interested members of the public. I have done this with the lectures for my Marine Ecology course "OCB4633C." This is a required course in the BS Marine Science program at colleges in the Florida State University system. I recorded the lectures by doing "voice overs" of my existing PowerPoint slideshow presentations, then converting the presentations to video and uploading them to YouTube. The voice over recording function in powerpoint also lets you use a "laser pointer" or "pen" tool to scribble on the slides as you talk, so I did a lot of that.

These presentations are not National Geographic quality, and some of them move a little slowly with an inordinate amount of "ums" and "ok, so"s. Anyway, with those disclaimers done, here are the videos, in the order that I would normally present these topics to the students. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments, if you note mistakes or unclear segments, etc.


Introduction and Patterns in the Marine Environment


Intertidal Ecology


Primary Production Pt. 1


Primary Production Pt. 2


Secondary Production


Microbial Ecology


Pelagic Ecosystems


Continental Shelf Ecosystems


Estuaries


Seagrass, Saltmarsh, and Mangrove Ecosystems


Coral Reef Ecosystems


Deep Sea Ecology


Foodwebs, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Functions (this one is long with a lot of theory; casual watchers may want to skip or save for last)


Fisheries Ecology


Aquaculture (aka Fish Farming)


Disturbance Ecology


Pollution and Climate Change

CERF Report 2019

I just got back from five days at the 2019 Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference in Mobile, Alabama. https://www.cerf.science/cerf-2019

View of Mobile Bay from the hotel room

Fancy boat outside the Mobile convention center

Statistics workshop with collaborators after the meeting

I’ve gone to science conferences like this once or twice per year since the early 2000s when I was a graduate student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science https://www.vims.edu. Conferences are a place to present your research with a poster or a talk, and to absorb and exchange ideas from others’ research. My usual conference is the Benthic Ecology Meeting (BEM https://www.bemsociety.org/), which is a get-together of marine biologists who specialize in sea-bottom life like seagrasses, corals, and shellfish. This was actually the first time I’ve been to a CERF meeting.

CERF overlaps a lot with BEM in terms of topics and attendees, with a couple of distinctions:

1. CERF includes more of what’s happening on land; in the “watersheds” that funnel freshwater and pollution into the ocean, and along the coastlines where marine and terrestrial ecosystems interact.
2. CERF has more focus on “applied research” as opposed to “basic research.” I.e., there is more focus on trying to understand and solve particular environmental problems.

My early-career research addressed a lot of basic issues like how grazers and predators, and biodiversity, per se, affect ecosystem processes. I’m still interested in those general topics, but my research since joining the faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University has been more “applied,” addressing particular environmental problems affecting seagrass beds and water quality in Southwest Florida. Going to this CERF conference, and schmoozing with other practitioners of both basic and applied research, was very helpful in inspiring me and giving me useful research ideas. I’ll briefly review some memorable things I picked up from the conference.

1. Genetic diversity within a single species can be very important, especially in seagrasses. In 2004, A. Randall Hughes et al. published a highly-influential paper showing that there were many different genetic strains within the eelgrass species (Zostera marina) in California. Hughes also showed that a genetically-mixed patch of eelgrass could resist and recover from environmental disturbances (like goose grazing) significantly better, than any one genetic strain alone. Fifteen years later, Hughes’ legacy was apparent at CERF in the numerous presentations on within-species genetic diversity effects in seagrass beds from all over the world.
2. “Living shorelines” are a growing, green revolution, even though most people don’t know what they are. Sea level rise, subsidence, and erosion are eating away at the coasts of the world, threatening both natural habitats and man-made coastal developments. The old way of dealing with this was by heavy-handed “coastal armoring” (seawalls, jetties, dikes, etc.), which tended to be expensive, bad for the environment, and prone to failure. The living shorelines approach uses natural protective elements like oyster reefs, mangroves, and saltmarsh grasses, in combination with man-made structural elements, to protect coasts in more natural, self-sustaining, and environmentally-beneficial ways. I saw talks showing how various living shoreline projects had reversed erosion, helped absorb nutrient pollution and carbon dioxide pollution, and created naturally-expanding habitats for birds, fish, and shellfish. Southwest Florida has hundreds of kilometers of eroding or unnaturally-armored canals and coasts that are prime candidates for living shoreline projects.
3. The global trend of seagrass decline from the mid 20^th century until now may have finally hit bottom and turned around into a recovery phase. However, this optimistic forecast is driven by a few, positive cases of recovery. Seagrasses continue to decline in many areas. Water quality seems to be a key factor differentiating the happy seagrass stories from the tragedies. Where water quality is naturally good, and/or there have been concerted efforts to improve water quality, seagrasses have spread and algae blooms have decreased. However, where pollution oversight has been lax, repeated harmful algal blooms and other water quality issues have devastated seagrass beds. Below is a rank of several important seagrass ecosystems in the eastern United States from most exciting recovery to most tragic decline in recent decades.
1. Virginia Coastal Bays- Exciting recovery! The shallow estuaries on the sparsely populated eastern side of the Delmarva peninsula are an ideal place for seagrass, with relatively little pollution. However, they lost all their seagrass in the 1930s due to a combination of hurricanes and disease, and they just had bare mud bottoms from then until the 1990s. It was hypothesized that “recruitment limitation” (a lack of seed supply) was the reason for the lack of natural recovery in the area. This hypothesis was tested in the late 1990s when Dr. Robert Orth’s group of VIMS scientists replanted some seagrass in one of the bays. To their joy, the seagrass rapidly expanded. Subsequent re-seeding efforts were even more successful. 20 years later, as Orth is retiring, he can be proud to have helped restore thousands of acres of seagrass, enhancing fish and waterfowl populations, improving water clarity, and furnishing the other wonderful “ecosystem services” that come with healthy seagrass beds.
2. Tampa Bay and Boston Harbor- Hard-Won Victories. In the late 20^th century, population growth in the Tampa Bay watershed led to severe nutrient pollution from wastewater and stormwater runoff. The nutrient pollution caused “eutrophication” – a chronic overgrowth of algae in the water and on the bottom. In these dark and murky waters, seagrasses perished for lack of light. Managers in the region got serious about upgrading wastewater treatment plants and stormwater infrastructure, and implementing stricter regulations on the sale and use of fertilizer. They started a multitude of projects, large and small, to reduce nutrient inputs. As one of their benchmarks for success they aimed to return seagrass beds to 1950s levels. Sure enough, nutrient levels in the water declined, which caused algae levels in the water to decline, which made the water clear enough for seagrass beds to rapidly expand. Tampa Bay recently surpassed the 1950s-based goal, and now has some of the clearest and fishiest water in generational memory. Another seagrass area in the USA that has a big urban population but has nevertheless made good progress in seagrass restoration is the Boston Harbor area. They made billion dollar investments in upgraded sewage treatment infrastructure, which translated into clearer harbor waters, regrowth of seagrass, and an invigorated city waterfront economy.
3. Chesapeake Bay- Finally turning the corner? Chesapeake Bay is a huge estuary spanning multiple states, with a watershed area that extends into even more states. The watershed includes many, heavily populated areas, as well as many areas of intensive agriculture, which makes reducing pollution to the bay a huge organizational challenge. The federally-funded Chesapeake Bay Program has been tracking bay health and implementing nutrient-reduction and habitat restoration projects in the area for years. There have been some ups and downs, with climate variation (extreme wet and dry, hot and cold years, etc.) often throwing a wrench in the works. But now, finally, it seems that a signal of recovery is emerging through the noise. Seagrasses in the bay are doing a bit better, though they still have a way to go before they meet the restoration goal. It’s time to seize that momentum and double down on restoration to make sure the positive trend continues and stabilizes. One encouraging thing to think about is the developing synergy between different types of habitat restoration effort in the bay. For example, restoring oyster beds along shorelines and channels in the bay increases the bay’s filter feeding capacity, which improves water clarity and can indirectly benefit seagrasses.
4. Florida Bay- Still Dicey. Florida Bay is the shallow expanse of water between the Everglades and the Florida Keys. It has relatively little nutrient pollution because of its unpopulated surroundings and the fact that most of the freshwater that enters it has been filtered through the extensive wetlands of the Everglades. The seagrass beds in Florida Bay are some of the largest in the world. However, Florida Bay periodically suffers from massive seagrass dieoffs related to hypersalinity (excessive saltiness). These hypersalinity events are worse now that much of the freshwater flow of the Everglades has been diverted for human uses. After a seagrass dieoff in Florida Bay there are after-shocks that can lead to more seagrass dieoffs. For example, dead and rotting seagrass releases nutrients into the water that fuel dense algal blooms. Furthermore, the lack of seagrass allows mud to be stirred up from the bottom by wind waves. The resultant plumes of dark, murky water kill more seagrass and other sea-bottom life, such as sponges, which are important filter feeders and habitat-providers. Everglades restoration projects are supposed to eventually deliver more freshwater to Florida Bay and reduce the hypersalinity events. Unfortunately, restoration progress is slow, and held up by contentious debates about things like how low the nutrient levels in the freshwater must be to prevent damage to the Everglades and the Bay. In the meantime, Florida Bay seagrasses die whenever there is a drought exacerbated by the unnaturally low freshwater flow.
5. Southwest Florida (Lee and Collier County)- Missing the recovery train. At the CERF meeting there was an ironic juxtaposition between my gloomy talk about “collapsing” ecosystems in SW Florida, and the talk that immediately followed mine, which was a sunny one about “recovering” ecosystems in SW Florida. Really we were both right; we were just talking about different parts of SW Florida. The other guy was talking about the northerly part of SW Florida that includes Tampa Bay but not Lee and Collier County, and I was talking about the southerly part of SW Florida that includes Lee and Collier County but not Tampa Bay. Anyway, seagrasses in my study areas are dying due to a combination of water quantity issues and water quality issues. The water quantity issues are well-known and related to artificial discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee River, which did not historically connect to the Lake. High discharges make the water of the Caloosahatchee Estuary and other connected estuaries too fresh for most seagrasses to survive, and also deliver dark, tannic waters, high nutrients, and sometimes harmful algae blooms to the estuaries and Gulf of Mexico. However, at other times the Caloosahatchee River flow is withheld for human uses and saltwater creeps abnormally far upstream, killing freshwater plants. While we have been obsessed with our bipolar water quantity problem and its complex solutions (which involve expensive changes to clean Okeechobee water and send more of it south into the Everglades again), we have been developing an equally serious water QUALITY problem that is more local in origin. I.e., sprawling development related to the ballooning population of SW Florida, in combination with weak regulations on both urban and agricultural nutrient sources, have led to rampant eutrophication of SW Florida’s estuaries. Our water is becoming too murky for seagrasses to grow, even at shallow depths, and gunky seaweeds are taking over formerly seagrassy places like Estero Bay. Furthermore, we have become the epicenter of a variety of recurring harmful algae blooms, some of them very dangerous to humans and other animals, and all of them related at least in part to our nutrient pollution. I asked one of the Tampa Bay restoration scientists what folks in “true SW Florida” could do to emulate Tampa Bay’s story of improving water quality and seagrass. He said, simply, “Start doing projects.” I think that’s excellent advice. It’s going to take lots of small and large nutrient-reduction projects to fix our water quality problem, so let’s start now and try to build momentum. While we’re doing little restoration things in our yards and communities, we can ask our leaders for big sewage system upgrades to “tertiary treatment with coupled nitrification-denitrification,” which removes most of the harmful nutrients and is what Tampa has, for the most part.
6. Indian River Lagoon- Paradise Lost. There’s one major seagrass system in Florida that is doing even worse than SW Florida, and that is the Indian River Lagoon (IRL)- a long, narrow estuary that runs parallel to the coast from Palm Beach to Cape Canaveral. The IRL is significant as the most biologically diverse estuary in the United States, because it spans from the temperate zone to the tropics and has a blend of species from both zones. A lot of those species depend directly or indirectly on the seven species of seagrasses found in the IRL. Up until 2011 the seagrasses and water clarity were slowly declining as a result of nutrient loading from human population growth in the areas around the IRL, combined with water quantity and salinity problems related to various canal systems and water diversions. But in 2011 the shit really hit the fan with a so-called “superbloom” of phytoplankton. The plankton darkened the waters and wiped out a majority of the IRL’s seagrass beds. Since then there have been all kinds of other nasty phytoplankton blooms alternating with nasty seaweed blooms, fish kills related to low oxygen, and even a super duper bloom in 2016 that was bigger than the original super bloom. It’s going to take a lot of nutrient reduction work, including septic to sewer conversions, new regulations on agriculture and suburban fertilizer use, wetland restoration, and other projects to restore the IRL. Needless to say, stricter limits on growth and sprawl are also desperately needed in the IRL watershed, as they are in SW Florida’s watersheds.  PS- Another Florida East Coast estuary that I’ll lump in with the IRL is Biscayne Bay, the high salinity estuary off of South Miami. It recently lost almost all its seagrasses as the culmination of decades of chronic nutrient loading and declining water quality. To preserve delicate ecosystems like seagrasses and reefs next door to a heavily populated area takes a serious investment in nutrient reduction infrastructure and regulation. Boston and Tampa did it fairly well, but SW Florida and SE Florida have dragged their feet to dire effect.
4. Climate change effects are showing up all over the place. A lot of research was presented on climate change impacts such as warming, sea level rise, and species range shifts. One of the sea level rise impacts examined was the shift of coastal forests to saltmarshes as saline water inundates roots. There were also tons of studies of the expansion of the black mangrove (Avicennia germinans) northward into former saltmarsh habitats. If the trend continues mangroves will eventually replace most of the saltmarshes along the Gulf of Mexico coastline. Seagrasses are also undergoing species range shifts. For example, in North Carolina where the temperate seagrass Zostera marina is at the southern end of its range and the tropical seagrass Halodule wrightii is at the northern end of its range, the ratio of the two coexisting species is shifting in favor of the tropical one. My own research colleagues presented data from turtlegrass (Thalassia testudinum) beds from Panama to Bermuda, which suggested that the intensity of grazing by tropical grazers is increasing in some areas, possibly due to warming.
5. Academia is a mixed bag. This is something I got from talking to a lot people I hadn’t seen since graduate school. Some were happy with their current lot, others were very frustrated. It seems that academic institutional cultures and pressures vary a lot from place to place. Some of my peers are flourishing in professional and supportive environments, while others are changing jobs in angst or leaving academia entirely due to shitty work environments. One of the stresses that some institutions seem to handle better than others is the teaching – research tradeoff. Expecting faculty to do a lot of both doesn’t seem to work well, and institutions transitioning from more teaching oriented to more research oriented sometimes jerk their faculty back and forth a lot through this process. I realized I’m pretty lucky to have landed at FGCU, where the teaching-research balance suits me pretty well.