Red Death

[HenryC]

This was rejected by Florida Wildlife.  I guess they thought it might be bad for tourism.

We got to the Seaplane Basin before daybreak, put the Pelican in the water and had her rigged in half an hour.  As soon as we parked the car and locked it up we were underway; by the time we reached the yacht club entrance, the little boat was settled down on her compass course, sails fully trimmed and responding nicely to a brisk breeze.   A couple of hours ahead lay our invisible destination, a small spoil island in the center of Tampa Bay near where the main ship channel made an abrupt turn north towards the port. The night was overcast but the horizon was clear and there were aids to navigation and lights on shore that could be used to verify our course.  This was a routine sail, we had made it before by compass in thick fog so we anticipated no problems today.

It's not uncommon to run into things in the dark; many streams empty into the Bay carrying all sorts of detritus and things fall off boats, so the first thud from up forward caused no alarm.  It was clear from the sound that we had suffered no damage.  But a few minutes later there was another, followed by another almost immediately; it was obvious something was amiss.  A quick look about us with our light revealed many big white, ghostly shapes; the water was littered with the floating corpses of dead fish for as far as the beam penetrated into the darkness.  It was now just a few minutes before sunrise and soon our eyes could pick them out unaided.  Fish, big fish, were everywhere, floating bloated on the black water and soon the faint smell of rotting flesh became evident.  They came in all sizes, of course, but the big ones were more dramatic.  Every Bay species I was familiar with was represented but red drum, or channel bass in the local angler's vernacular, seemed to predominate.  Many of them were big lunkers too, well over two feet long.  There was enough light now to steer around them, so we could get close enough alongside to get a better look.  The fish were swollen and discolored, their scales peeling off and the flesh beneath in tatters.  The drum were not their usual coppery red, but pale and ghostly, recognizeable only by the prominent spot they carried at the base of their tails. The other fish were similarly disfigured by death and scavengers and  the larger ones sometimes had gulls standing on them, feasting on the poisoned flesh. As the sun rose, the extent of the disaster became evident; for as far as the eye could see the waters were dotted by grayish white specks and we knew that for every one afloat there were probably many more lying on the bottom. I had never realized there were so many big fish in Tampa Bay and now I feared there might not be any left. It was a catastrophe, a holocaust.

"Jim Breves", my shipmate muttered under his breath.  It was biologist's slang for Gymnodium breve, the scientific name for the monster responsible for the devastation. The micro-organism has since been renamed, Karenia brevis, but by any name it is the same: the Red Tide. The Red Tide, of course, has nothing to do with the ocean tides at all; it is a microscopic (3/100ths of a millimeter) red algae found along the Florida coast.  Normally, this single-celled plant floats harmlessly in the plankton, just one of many thousands of similar life forms that inhabit the upper layers of the sea in untold billions.  But under certain conditions of water temperature, solar illumination and chemistry, K. brevis multiplies explosively, or blooms, in vast numbers, discoloring the sea itself a reddish color.  In these concentrations, with tens of millions of the plants in every liter of water, the cells excrete lethal quantities of toxins which are deadly to sea life.  Anything can be affected, either by dying outright (even manatees have been known to be affected by it) or by concentrating toxins in their tissues, making them poisonous to other sea life.  Although no human deaths can be directly attributed to the Tide, on really bad outbreaks the toxin can be dispersed through the atmosphere, causing breathing difficulties among some people living near the shore.  Economic consequences of the Tide, both in disruption of fisheries and the tourist industry, can be severe. 

Although it cannot be ruled out that this phenomenon might be aggravated by Man's activities, particularly the release of nutrients in agricultural runoff, the Tide is nothing new; it was first reported by Spanish sailors in the sixteenth century. Similar species of toxic algae occasionally bloom throughout the world's oceans when conditions favor it and Florida residents are quite familiar with it--I have known about it since I was a child. Surprisingly, although its affects can be quite severe locally, sometimes covering hundreds of square miles and lasting for weeks at a time, the marine environment seems to recover quite quickly.  As with the wildfires that occasionally rage through the state's pine and scrublands, or the hurricanes that periodically pound the coast, the sea and the land here rebound quickly and the local flora and fauna seem to readily absorb the punishment and soon return to normal.

It was full daylight when we approached the spoil island.  These small shoals are the result of bay bottom dredged up when the ship channels are widened or deepened.  They are low sandbars, barely above the high tide mark and are usually naked sand and shell with only a few salt-resistant plants growing there, providing it has been there long enough for them to get a foothold.
We often spent the night on them, and they made a good base for fishing trips, or even to unload our gear while we went on short day sails in the surrounding waters.  On summer weekends they were often crowded with picnicers and water skiers and surrounded by power boats at anchor.  They were a great place to just hang out, relax and watch the ocean-going freighters make the big turn to head up towards the docks in town. Today, we had it all to ourselves and it was no surprise: that from a few hundred yards off, through the binoculars, we could see the shoal was haloed by a huge cloud of gulls.  They were feeding on dead fish, fish by the ton, lying in heaps on the sand where they had been deposited by the tides.  It was a ghastly place.  The smell was dreadful, but we soon maneuvered ourselves to windward of the shoal and hove-to, to take in the spectacle from a safe distance. Spending the night there was out of the question, but we pulled the boat up on the beach on the weather side and explored the island anyway.  We had come this far, we had to get a closer look at this.

Rarely did Red Tide strike in the Bay itself, usually it affected the Gulf beaches, but some vagary of wind and current had swept the poison in and created a death trap for the Bay's creatures.  The gulls seemed to be immune to it, or at least, we didn't see any dead ones; or perhaps the fish had died somewhere else and had just drifted in.  At any rate, neither of us felt any discomfort from any airborne toxin as is sometimes the case in really bad outbreaks. Perhaps the Tide had already moved on, and only its legacy was left behind.  After a few minutes ashore we decided to cut our trip short and sail back.  The return sail was uneventful and the dead fish seemed to all have been blown away into some other part of the Bay. Just a few minutes away from the island it was like it had never happened. It was a sobering ride home, nonetheless. 

Little is known about the Tide, although it is the subject of intense scientific investigation. Blooms seem to be associated, at least in part, with iron minerals in dust windblown all the way across the Atlantic from the Sahara desert; and it is suspected that a marine bacterium, Trichodesmium, uses this iron to convert nitrogen nutrients in sea water into a form more easily absorbed by the algae, favoring K. brevis and provoking the blooms.  Once again, we are reminded that the Earth and its living things are all interconnected in a complex and intricate tapestry of cause and effect.  Scientists are currently experimenting with various sampling and survey methods, including satellite imagery, to try and predict future blooms.  It is hoped that accurate forecasts may mitigate some of the damage done to tourism and marine interests and perhaps better management of our own industrial and agricultural activities may reduce the frequency and extent of these outbreaks; but whether or not we should try to intervene in this natural cycle is another matter.  We simply don't know what we're doing well enough to risk it yet.

We made it back to the Seaplane Basin by late that afternoon.  All the way back we were quiet, and we spoke little while getting the boat back on the trailer or on the long drive home. Even with our knowledge of the local waters and our familiarity with Jim Breve, the sheer magnitude of this kill was disturbing for us.  There are rhythms and currents in the world we simply do not understand, and it is easy, especially as an outdoorsman or sportsman, or even a naturalist, to become sentimental and nostalgic about nature.  There is life there, to be sure, but there is also death; and no matter how stubborn and resilient the biosphere can be it is still only the thin, barely clinging edge of a vast universe essentially hostile to life.