May 2014 Caloosahatchee Seagrass Fieldwork Slideshow

NOTE: This is a very sciencey post, which is also presented on my pure-science blog, http://drdouglass.blogspot.com/ I haven't quite figured out yet what kind of posts I'll put just on my science blog, just on this jimbo blog, or on both blogs. I guess it depends on how interested my windsurfing followers are in science, which will be indicated by their comments or the lack thereof.

Since 2013 I've been working under a contract with the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) to monitor Submersed Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) in the Caloosahatchee Estuary. "SAV" includes seagrasses, which live in saltwater, but it also includes freshwater plants that resemble seagrasses. There are two main reasons to monitor SAV:

1. SAV provides valuable "ecosystem services" such as creating food and habitat for animals (and fishing opportunities for humans), improving water clarity, removing excessive nutrients and carbon dioxide, and reducing erosion.

2. SAV is extremely sensitive to water quality, so changes in the amount of SAV can indicate pollution or other problems in the water environment that need to be addressed.

The Caloosahatchee Estuary has historically supported healthy beds of SAV both in the saltwater part where it joins the Gulf of Mexico and in the fresher part around the city of Fort Myers and upriver. Different species of SAV are typically found in the different parts of the estuary; seagrasses near the Gulf of Mexico, and freshwater "tapegrass" in the more inland part of the estuary. Man-made changes in pollution and salinity levels may affect SAV differently in the different parts of the estuary, so we monitor SAV at seven different spots along the length of the estuary.

The red writing on this map shows the seven sites where we monitor the abundance and health of SAV. The yellow writing shows where water quality (salinity, temperature, pollution, etc.) is measured. Collecting all this data allows us to relate changes in SAV to changes in water quality.

SAV has declined recently in some parts of the Caloosahatchee Estuary, with the worst declines being in the fresh and brackish parts where there's virtually no tapegrass anymore. Unstable salinity levels and murky, polluted water, which are both related to human activities in the land areas that drain into the estuary, are largely to blame.

Keeping track of SAV health over such a large area is a big job, especially with the rigorous monitoring and bookkeeping methods required to meet the high standards of the SFWMD. For example, at each of the seven monitoring sites we survey, we assess seagrass characteristics at 30 random points sprinkled over an area the size of a football field. Each point has its own designated Latitude and Longitude coordinates, and we use waterproof GPS units to find the points. This year we are also entering data directly into specialized "Trimble" GPS units, which seemed like a lot of trouble at first but is OK now that I've reallocated some money from the SFWMD to hire extra helpers. With me plus a paid research technician, plus two paid graduate students, plus a small army of unpaid undergraduate interns, we now have this fieldwork on LOCK. We got our May SAV (Submersed Aquatic Vegetation) monitoring for the SFWMD done with speed and style, and even had the time to take pictures while were out there (See slideshow below).

The SAV in the lower Caloosahatchee Estuary looked thick and healthy in May relative to its sparse abundance earlier in the year. However, the epiphytic algae growing on it was quite thick in places- possibly indicating excessive nutrient inputs from humans or a deficiency of algae-eating animals. In the upper Caloosahatchee Estuary the submerged aquatic vegetation remained very sparse.

Zipping on the Step-Tail Twin-Fin WindSUP

I continue to be smugly pleased with my modifications to the Angulo Surfa 10'4" windsurfable SUP. Whereas the original board loved wave-fuel but couldn't get much speed with wind-fuel alone, the modified board can adapt to whatever power source is available; wind and/or waves.

Yesterday the surf was barely knee-high, but an offshore wind gusting around 15 knots made up for the lack of wave power and led to a fun planing session with a 6.4 sail. The other sailor in the video is Alex from Naples, riding another type of windsup- an 8'5" RRD Wassup.

Rundown of Spring 2014

I had a busy spring semester of teaching and research at Florida Gulf Coast University and didn't have much leisure time to spend on blogging. So now that I've turned in all my final grades and shifted gears to research-only mode for summertime, I'll catch up on some of the things I would have blogged about if I hadn't been so busy.

I kept my first-year students busy with lab activities in my "Marine Systems" class.

I hired a research technician to help me with labwork and fieldwork in the Caloosahatchee Estuary. She and my graduate student also made an official school webpage for me: http://blogs.fgcu.edu/douglasslab/

Sometimes the fieldwork was awesome.

In the lower part of the Caloosahatchee Estuary we saw cool saltwater critters like this Spotted Batfish.

Sometimes the fieldwork was not awesome, but we still got it done.

In the upper Caloosahatchee Estuary, where the water is mostly fresh, we searched for signs of Vallisneria americana, a grasslike underwater plant. As recently as the 1990s, Vallisneria formed lush underwater meadows in this area, full of brackish-water loving fishes and crustaceans. Unfortunately, unstable salinities resulting from irregular water flows through a man-made structure on the Caloosahatchee (the S-79 lock and dam) have decimated the Vallisneria. Where we searched near a bird rookery island in March, all we found were a few solitary blades of the grass, plus lots of gross mud and cracked eggshells and such.

The one thing I did make time to blog about this spring was windsurfing, although there were a few good windsurfing sessions and projects that I neglected to document. One project was changing the "double concave" bottom on my formula board to a "flat vee." It helped the board plane earlier and easier, and hasn't had any negative impacts that I can tell.

Intermediate stage in the bottom-shape conversion, where I had routed out the concave sections before filling them flush with foam slabs.

Another windsurfing project was shipping the RRD beginner board I'd picked up on craiglist to a buyer in the Northeast. Shipping windsurfing gear is an expensive boondoggle.

I used about four rolls of packing tape and 20 cardboard boxes to wrap this on up, hence the sarcophagus appearance.

My dog Grace learned how to SUP. I lured her onto the board with treats, but it was hardly necessary because she took to it quite naturally.

She's so calm on the water that she'll even lie down and rest on the board.

The Exocet WindSUP 11'8", with it's ample width and flotation, is nearly perfect for dog SUPing, though if I was only using it for that I would put some grippy padding on the nose because Grace likes to stand right on the bow.

There were some interesting botanical events around my house in Bonita Springs.

One was the sexual maturation of a large agave plant in our front yard. It shot up a towering inflorescence, which began looking like a giant asparagus, then morphed into a multi-tiered flower structure as tall as our royal palm tree.

Another botanical event was our replacement of a ratty looking Crape Myrtle with some cute little Bougainvilleas.

Rhonda also bought us a "tasteful" garden gnome sculpture. I assume our next purchase will be a pink plastic flamingo.

I shouldn't forget to mention Rhonda's HUGE spring news: She achieved her life's goal of getting a big book publishing contract. Titan Books bought her latest sci-fi novel, plus two more (not written yet) from the same trilogy.

Despite being a famous author, Rhonda still works full time for NASDAQ and works as a full-time dog parent and semi-pro miniature golfer.

Besides the worrying environmental trends I've seen during my research outings in the Caloosahatchee Estuary, there have been some other interesting and upsetting things going on with the environment of Southwest Florida. One of them is the relentless conversion of undeveloped greenspace to housing developments and shopping centers.

This is a political cartoon from outside one of my colleagues' offices. It was drawn in 1997. The areas around FGCU now look a lot more like the 2020 picture!

In addition to the permanent loss of terrestrial wildlife habitat when these developments are built, I'm concerned about the additional runoff pollution that they'll introduce to the area's already strained waterways.

The canal near our house, for example, is looking really gunky.

One thing that I think degrades the health of the canal is that it's always being sprayed with herbicide. Some of the spraying is because its next to some disused railroad tracks. Though they don't maintain the tracks themselves in a state that would allow a train to pass, they still think it's necessary to poison every living thing in the right-of-way until its a shriveled brown wisp. Not all the herbicide is for the railroad tracks, though. They actually spray it right in/on the water of the canal and the wetland plants around it. I guess the government (city, county, state?) worries that it will get too clogged with plants to effectively drain water off the land in a flood. Some of the plants are non-native, too, like the beautiful floating "Water Hyacinth." The Lee County Hyacinth Control District often poisons them, but sometimes uses other methods, like introducing herbivorous fishes.

Canal filling up with live hyacinths before poisoning.

Canal full of live and dead hyacinths, and poison, after poisoning.

I'm not an expert, but my instinct as a scientist is that the best thing to do if the floating plants become a nuisance would be to sweep them up off the surface of the water with some kind of giant net or rake, then turn them into nutrient-rich compost for agriculture and gardening. You see, when aquatic plants grow they absorb the excess nutrient pollution from the water. If you kill them and leave them in the water to rot, all the nutrients and pollution (plus the herbicide) go right back into the water, causing problems downstream and in the ocean. But if you scooped them out instead you'd be removing the excess nutrient pollution- a win-win scenario.

Another uncool environmental trend is the fad of shark-fishing off the beach. Lots of macho young dudes will show up at the beach around sunset and set up tons of rods right in the area where everyone is swimming, beachcombing, and windsurfing. Sometimes they'll cast their baits out, and other times they'll use a kayak to put bigger baits out really far to try to catch bigger sharks.

Believe it or not, this small, butchered shark was actually being used as BAIT by a young man fishing off Bonita Beach Access #10. After an unsuccessful night of fishing he tossed it away in the water, where it drifted back and forth in the waves until bumping into an unsuspecting swimmer the next day, right before this picture was taken. Though there appear to be decent populations of small and medium sized sharks in Florida, their populations are actually extremely low compared to their healthy, historical abundance, and many shark species are still in decline. So I don't think catch and kill shark fishing should be allowed.

On a completely different note, I'm going to need a new windsurfing vehicle soon. The speedometer and odometer have never worked, the gas gauge doesn't work, the air conditioner doesn't work, and now the backhatch is rusting off. I might have to make a last-minute new-used minivan purchase before my honeymoon trip to the Florida Keys this June.

I'll stop there for now.

Windsurf Board Size Explained

Picking the right windsurf board size is tricky, especially if you're new to windsurfing.

Part of the reason it's tricky is because experienced windsurfers and the windsurfing media are a bad influence. We're always emphasizing progression to smaller boards, and dismissing big boards as just the "training wheels" of the sport. As a result, new windsurfers often end up with crazy misconceptions about what kind of gear to buy and what kind of path of progression to expect.

Here are some of the WORST pieces of advice that I typically hear:

Bad Advice #1- "I learned on XYZ terrible too-small board in the '80s, and now in PQR super-windy place where I live I never sail anything bigger than 85 liters, so if you're athletic and determined like me you should have no problem learning on this tiny shortboard that I want to sell you to use in your glassy calm 1-acre lake in Ohio."

Bad Advice #2- "Once you have a week or so of experience, you'll never again have use for a big longboard with a daggerboard, so you should just skip the longboard and buy this shortboard that doesn't work worth a crap unless the wind is blowing more than 15 knots."

Bad Advice #3- "If you want to learn to go fast and use the harness and footstraps and do jibes and waterstarts then you need to buy this tiny shortboard that will actually be impossible to sail unless you already know how to do all that stuff."

To counter some of that bad advice there is my Windsurfing Gear Calculator, which takes weight, wind strength, and skill level into account to figure out roughly what size and style of gear is appropriate. The calculator is a bit technical, though, so I've also tried to capture the essence of things in these two pictures:

This picture explains when you should use a big board, and when you should use a small board. Basically, small boards are only appropriate if you are a skilled windsurfer AND it's windy. When the wind is too light to plane, the best performing board will always be a big board with a daggerboard, and this is true regardless of the rider's skill.

This picture explains how board size is related to body size. What is a "big board" or a "small board" to you is relative to your body size, but the daggerboard also plays a role. I.e., a big person's small board would not be a good small person's big board, because it wouldn't have a daggerboard.

4.2 one day, Windsup next day

A late season cold front blew into Florida this week. It provided strong side-onshore wind as it arrived, then light, side-offshore wind with residual swells as it departed.

On the first day I was expecting 15-20 knot wind; maybe just enough to ride my 5.5 sail on a 106 liter shortboard. But at the beach it was blowing like crazy; perfect for a 4.5 and my 83 liter board... which I had left at home. Doh! I ended up doing fine by putting a 4.2 on my 106. A narrower board would have been more comfortable in the chop, but the nice float of the 106 helped me keep momentum when swerving way upwind or downwind riding waves. The song in the video was River in the Road by Queens of the Stone Age.



The second day was obviously a sup or windsup day, with small swells and little coughs of side-offshore wind from about 4-14 knots. I used a 5.5 and the modified Angulo Windsup. (I REALLY need to get my 6.8 fixed/replaced- it would have been perfect that day.) At first, catching the waves with the 5.5 was easy. Once on a wave, the board would zoom up to a fast planing speed with a lot of apparent wind. As the wind got lighter and less dependable, it took more careful positioning and luck to get on a wave. At that point I could have switched to a paddle and caught a few more rides, but I'd had a good sesh and I needed to go teach my night class, so I bagged it. Good times. The song in the video was "Half" by Soundgarden.



This DOUBLE WINGER SWALLOW-PIN-TAIL TWIN-FIN DUCK-STEP WINDSUP WITH SUCK-HOLE TECHNOLOGY is working really well for me. I think the best thing about it is how it generates speed down the line in small waves, which helps you feel like you're riding a bigger wave with stronger wind. I hope some more experienced board builders will copy my idea and develop it further.

Angulo WindSUP and Exocet Cross Wavesailing Videos

A cool front Friday pushed nice 1-meter waves and 15-20 knot winds across the Gulf of Mexico into Southwest Florida. For us those are epic conditions. I went to my usual wavesailing spot, Wiggins Pass State Park in North Naples, and rigged a 5.5. For the board I chose a 106 liter Exocet Cross II. The Cross is my favorite board of all time, and I have even more love for it lately since matching it with a 26 cm wave fin from Maui Ultra Fins- It's fast, loose, and smooth while still early to plane and good upwind. The wind angle was sideshore enough to allow both backside- and some frontside wave riding, so I felt like I had a lot of mobility on the waves.



After a while the wind dropped from 15-20 to 10-15. I probably could have stayed on the Cross if my 6.8 sail wasn't busted, but without a bigger sail as an option I went for my bigger board, the modified Angulo Surfa 10'4". This was my first time trying the Surfa since my final round of modifications- Front footstraps and a "suck-hole" to facilitate water release in the step-tail cutout. With all the added features, the board can now be called, ahem...

The DOUBLE WINGER SWALLOW-PIN-TAIL TWIN-FIN DUCK-STEP WINDSUP WITH SUCK-HOLE TECHNOLOGY

"Wingers" are the little lateral notches where the board transitions from a wider midsection to a narrower tail. Mine is a DOUBLE WINGER because it has curved wingers near the tail from the original Angulo shape, plus sharp wingers in the new underside that I added.

A "swallow-tail" is a tail that splits into two points, which the new bottom section that I added does. The original Angulo came to a single "pin-tail." Hence SWALLOW-PIN-TAIL to describe the modified board.

The original board had a single center fin with two small "thruster" fins on either side. I removed the center fin and covered the thruster slots, but added a large fin in each lobe of the swallow tail, making the board a TWIN-FIN. I decided to go with a twin-fin instead of a single fin design so that I could use shorter, more maneuverable fins but still have enough fin area to balance out the wide tail of the big board and the relative large sails I hoped to use on the board. I'm currently using the former center fin (21 cm Angulo SUP fin) in one of the slots, and the stock fin from a Starboard Evo 83 (23 cm Drake fin) in the other slot. Oddly enough I had some problems with the 23 cm fin spinning out, but not the 21 cm. I might see if I can order another 21 cm Angulo SUP fin to get a match. I never liked that 23 cm Drake fin anyway- it used to spin out in the Evo, as well.

A "step-tail" is a design where there are two layers to the tail section of the board, divided by an abrupt step behind the fin. The top layer projects further aft, making the board longer for better glide at slow speeds. But at higher speeds the top part releases from the water, making the board effectively shorter and therefore faster and more maneuverable. A "duck-tail" is a particular type of step tail where the top layer of the tail angles upward more than the bottom layer. Because the original Angulo shape had a lot of "rocker" in the tail, it naturally created a DUCK-STEP tail when I added the flat bottom layer.

Technically a WINDSUP is any stand-up paddleboard fitted with a mast-attachment point for windsurfing. However, a good windsup will also have some other windsurfing-specific features that deviate from the default SUP design. In addition to the tail modifications and footstraps that I added to facilitate planing windsurfing, this windsup also has a slot for a pseudo-daggerboard center fin. Josh Angulo helped me add that back when I lived in Massachusetts and we were using the board as Rhonda's beginner board.

The crowning grace (or disgrace, perhaps) of my board modification is the SUCK-HOLE TECHNOLOGY. It's the hollow tip of an old, carbon fiber mast, which pierces diagonally through the deck of the board into the notch created by the swallow-step-tail. I put it there to counteract the sucking-to-the-water effect that might be created by the duck-tail at certain speeds. Now when the duck tail tries to suck to the water, it sucks air instead, releasing it from the water and helping initiate planing. I know the suck-hole works, because if I put my toes over it when I'm sailing near planing speed I can feel it sucking air pretty hard. The only annoyance is that at slow, non-planing speeds the suck-hole sometimes spits froth instead of sucking.

How did the DOUBLE WINGER SWALLOW-PIN-TAIL TWIN-FIN DUCK-STEP WINDSUP WITH SUCK-HOLE TECHNOLOGY actually perform? See for yourself-

Limulus polyphemus- I love horseshoe crabs

Here are some of the reasons I love horseshoe crabs:

1. Horseshoe crabs are cool-looking, like an alien space helmet with spider legs, pincers, and a spike tail.

2. Horseshoe crabs' oddly-positioned compound eyes are large and shaped such as to give them an inscrutable and vaguely menacing glower. In addition to their two main eyes, they have some less obvious eyespots further forward on their carapace.

3. The horseshoe crab lineage has maintained the same body form since the Ordovician period 450 million years ago. During that time all their close relatives have perished, making them the sole modern representatives of a prehistoric group that included such monsters as the Eurypterid "sea scorpions." Their closest living kin are the terrestrial (land dwelling) spiders and scorpions... but you could hardly call them close because they diverged from a common ancestor about 480 million years ago! Calling them "crabs" is misleading, because they're even further separated from the crustaceans (which include crabs) than they are from spiders and scorpions.

4. Horseshoe crabs are scarily amazing when you pick them up and turn them over to reveal their numerous legs, claws, and flap-like gills. But they don't pinch too hard, so go ahead and pick one up to take a look. Just watch out for the spike tail (the "telson").

5. There are no horseshoe crabs on the West Coast so I never saw a live one when I was growing up. That makes getting to see them in action here on the East Coast extra cool. The Atlantic Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus) is pretty tolerant of a wide range of temperatures, so it lives from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to Canada. There are also some three species of horseshoe crab that live in the Indo-Pacific region.

6. Horseshoe crabs are ecologically important. Beside playing a role as low-level predators and sediment-stirrer-uppers in benthic (sea-bottom) food chains, they provide a vital food source for loggerhead sea turtles. Also, horseshoe crab eggs are a critical food for migrating shorebirds (sandpipers and such). Horseshoe crabs lay eggs in massive numbers on sandy beaches, and shorebirds time their arduous arctic - tropic migrations to make a refueling stop on the beaches where the horseshoe crab eggs will be. If there are no eggs to eat, the birds die of exhaustion and starvation before completing their migration.

7. Horseshoe crabs are important to humans, but also threatened by human activities. In increasing order of the unique value of their services, horseshoe crabs have provided us with 1) agricultural fertilizer,

2) bait for eel and whelk traps

and 3) a blood-cell extract called LAL that can be used to check for bacterial contamination of fluids and medical devices before they are put into the human body. The LAL story has been getting around a lot lately and was recently a feature article in the The Atlantic magazine. While I'm strongly opposed to the wasteful use of horseshoe crabs for fertilizer and bait, I think the blood harvest is pretty important... as long as it's done sustainably. Some progress has been made towards that end. For instance, we no longer kill the beasts to take their blood- we just partially drain them and then release them, whereafter they have about an 80% survival rate.

Scientists are now working to make a synthetic version of LAL so we don't need to suck horseshoe crab blood to get it. Let's hope that works out.