Florida, USA: What can be done to help as another precious ecosystem seems to be reaching a critical tipping point? "“We may have reached a tipping point,” said Troy Rice, who directs the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, a federal, state and local government partnership at the St. Johns River Water Management District. Mr. Rice’s fear, widely shared, is that an ecosystem that supports more than 4,300 species of wildlife — and commercial fisheries, tourism and other businesses generating nearly $4 billion annually — is buckling under the strain of decades of pollution generated by coastal Florida’s explosive development. The evidence of decline is compelling. In 2011 and 2012, unprecedented blooms of algae blanketed the estuary’s northern reaches for months, killing vast fields of underwater sea grass that are the building blocks of the estuary ecosystem. The grasses are breeding grounds for fish, cover from predators, home to countless creatures at the bottom of the food chain and, not least of all, the favorite menu item of manatees."" ..... "The manatees died without warning, while the dolphins and pelicans wasted away over days, losing muscle and becoming disoriented. Manatees eat plants; dolphins and pelicans eat fish. Manatees and dolphins are mammals; pelicans are birds. Pelicans died by the hundreds; other estuary birds seem to have gone mostly unscathed. Other creatures that eat seaweed, like sea turtles, also seem to have remained healthy." ..... "“We hypothesize that whatever caused these manatees to die was either ingested or gotten through drinking,” Martine de Wit, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who autopsied the manatees, said in an interview. “It’s logical to think it’s the macroalgae that they ingested.” A federal laboratory is analyzing seaweed samples in search of toxins. Both Dr. de Wit and Jan H. Landsberg, a biotoxin expert at the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute of the Conservation Commission who is helping coordinate the inquiry, emphasize that the hypothesis is just one of many. The deaths “might just be coincidental,” Dr. Landsberg said. “The key is not to go down too many rabbit holes.” And to go down the most promising ones quickly. For the deaths may not be a one-time event; the estuary’s dolphins suffered suspiciously similar, still unexplained die-offs in 2001 and 2008. “If this spreads,” she said, “we don’t know what the implications are.”"
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 23:34:08 +0000
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