Grassbed Blues

Led by longtime Indian River Lagoon researcher Dr. Grant Gilmore, biologists Bob Voisinet, Pam Hopkins and Annie McElhatten directed operations and recorded data as volunteers labored to document the consequences of a dramatic seagrass decline in the southern Indian River Lagoon.

Not that the yield from 30 scientifically selected random tosses of a 1-square-yard drop net much labor to document: three grass shrimp, one brown shrimp and half a dozen quarter-inch blue crabs, all clinging to what Gilmore endearingly refers to as sea snot, drifting clumps of slimy mucous-like algae.

Sailfish Flats, as the area is known, gained undesired national notoriety two years ago when its bordering landmasses, Sailfish Point and Sewell's Point, played host to two hurricane eyes—Frances and Jeanne—exactly three weeks apart in September 2004. Wilma whacked it again last October. So no one is shocked to find its waters degraded.

However, the waters just to the north of the eyewalls experienced even worse trauma. While Sewell's Point/Sailfish Point residents sweated out an unnerving calm within the eyes of the evil twins, powerful north-quadrant winds generated sloshing waves that scoured the bottom of virtually every tendril of shallow seagrass from Jensen to Vero Beach.

Yet a boatride north of Jensen Beach Causeway, some seven miles north of St. Lucie Inlet at Stuart, today reveals rebounding grassbeds teeming with the thousands of pinfish, mojarras, glass minnows and crustaceans one would expect. Anglers reveled in outstanding snook and trout fishing here all winter and spring, and perhaps the finest redfish and pompano numbers seen in many years.

Why not the inlet and the St. Lucie River? And in the big scheme of life, does it matter if a few miles of grass disappear if the other hundred-plus miles of lagoon grassbeds appear on the road to recovery?

To answer the second question, Gilmore pointed to the shoreline a quarter mile to the east, where ocean water pours in quickly with the tide from the nearby St. Lucie Inlet.

“Years ago, we landed so many juvenile grouper and yellowtail and mutton snapper along that shoreline we literally couldn't lift our nets out of the water,” he explained. “It's not just juvenile snook and seatrout that require shallow grassbeds to survive. Research indicates that grouper and snapper larvae gravitate to grass areas just inside inlets. The grass may be healthy several miles from the inlet, but larvae survival demands that they settle into grassbeds when they first get swept inside an estuary. Several miles is too far. That first stretch inside an inlet is absolutely vital. I think we can expect major declines in recruitment of new adult fish the next few years.”

A fine-meshed 50-foot bag seine pulled along that same shoreline now produced a paltry two pounds of Cuban anchovies (a.k.a. glass minnows), a few inch-long scaled sardines, pinfish and mojarras, a pair of pipefish, one striped mullet, a 12-inch snook and four universally unavoidable hardhead catfish. No snapper. No grouper. Nothing to indicate even a glimmer of the vibrant seagrass-based ecosystem long accepted as the most diverse in North America, perhaps on the planet. Gilmore claims no other estuary on earth can document 156 residential fish species.

Globs of gelatin-like goo cloak the few remaining lifeless acres of seagrass beds, such as those just inside Sailfish Flats east of Long Island.

What has prevented this vital stretch of the Indian River from recovering? Florida Oceanographic Coastal Center Director, Mark Perry, lays the blame on the 855 billion gallons of water flushed from Lake Okeechobee last year.

“That's the equivalent of 51/2 feet off the top of the 700-square-mile lake. About a third of that water came down the St. Lucie River, the rest went west to the Caloosahatchee. But not all that water exits directly into the Atlantic. Flood tides push about 30 percent of that polluted, turbid fresh water north and south into the bisecting IRL. The turbidity and siltation have a direct impact on the grass. No sunlight, no grass. “

An optimistic period for recovery, according to Perry, is a minimum of a year. “Manatee and Johnson's grasses spread along lateral root systems. Hopefully their roots are fairly intact and they'll sprout when conditions improve. But that's just the grasses. It'll take a minimum of another year for the benthic species to return. It takes that long to regenerate food within the grassbeds to support the dependent critters.

“But if they release water again this summer, we're looking at an additional year or two. Any time salinity levels drop below 15 parts per thousand, even for a couple of days, the grass starts to die off.

“I keep hearing water managers and the Corps talking about nature's resiliency, how nature always bounces back. They use that philosophy to justify polluting our river. It infuriates me.”

Perry's frustration stems from a lifetime of witnessing the estuary's episodic demise. In 1998, extended Okeechobee releases purged the St. Lucie system of seagrass and oysters. Continual fish kills and schools of diseased, lesioned fish brought recreational fishing and its related industries—Stuart's economic lifeblood—to a standstill.

Visitors to Lee County inshore waters, on Florida's lower Gulf Coast, can empathize. Rob Jess is manager of Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge and an avid fisherman. He estimates that prior to the massive Lake Okeechobee discharges down the Caloosahatchee River, turtlegrass provided 90 to 95 percent coverage of refuge waters. Today he calculates coverage at 10 to 15 percent. New 2006 data put seagrass loss between 60 and 70 percent. Where seagrass does remain, high-cellulose, dead Cladophora algae mats continue to smother it.

“I snapped photos of what we estimated to be a thousand redfish tails in the wilderness area in front of the observation tower just prior to Hurricane Charley in 2004,” Jess said. “Today, that spot is all but dead.”

He cites three factors in refuge seagrass decline: light attenuation, nutrient overload and opportunistic algae that displace dying native grasses. Refuge managers may have to shut down all motorized access to wilderness areas following an evaluation of seagrass coverage after the current growing season.

Jess hopes for a recuperation period of three to five years. However, a consensus of consulting biologists claims recovery may take 20 to 30 years if the refuge is inundated again over the next two or three years.

River advocates on both coasts are especially concerned about the years ahead because we appear to be in the midst of a 30-year wet cycle that could trigger ever more frequent onslaughts of releases from Lake Okeechobee into the estuaries. Many of the activists are proposing lawsuits against both federal and state authorities, contending that the only viable solution is to create a storage flow-way that would cover roughly 20 percent of the Everglades Agricultural Area just south of the lake.

Elected officials have consistently failed to address the critical need for more of the lake water to be moved south instead of into the estuaries, according to the conservationists.

Biologists perhaps aren't the people to ask about recovery timetables, since its fate largely rests in the politicized grasp of water managers. Granted a recent, temporary reprieve from Lake Okeechobee's pollution, isolated patches of Johnson's and manatee grass are already poking

their first delicate probes from the sands of the southern Indian River, as if wondering if it's safe to come out.