Red tide cycle in Lee ‘normal’ so far
Red tide season has come to the Beach again, but experts tell us not to be overly concerned this time.
Red tide, the dinoflagellate Karena brevis, is a naturally occurring organism that thrives in salinated waterways, near the ocean for example. It also can bloom in large quantity, usually accelerated by a protein-rich environment, and has a deep red hue to it, giving it its colloquial title.
“A lot of disinformation has a lot to do with how people perceive red tide, and considering it’s a naturally occurring event dating to the 1700s in ship logs, it’s not new, but it’s something we can try to care for,” Daniel Eaton, Florida master naturalist with the Ostego Bay Foundation, said.
When nutrients from inland areas flow down rivers and arrive in the ocean they supply a nutritious feast for algae, causing it to rapidly grow. This can happen naturally as rivers flood and bring nutrient-rich soil from forests and grasslands, but it can also happen when fertilizer and excrement from livestock travel down those same waterways, or when coastal development leads to excess erosion.
Many algae produce toxins that both taint the water and become airborne when they are at the surface. These toxins are harmful to marine mammals, birds, and turtles. This is because many of these larger carnivores are high up on the food chain, and the toxins accumulate as they ingest contaminated prey.
“The last big event a couple of years ago caused a lot of fish kills, but people don’t consider the fish that didn’t wash up. Those corpses sink to the bottom and can create hypoxic zones, areas without enough oxygen to support the ocean life in the area. It affects the life cycles of marine life and you just hope for no major events during the recovery portions of these cycles,” Eaton said.
Eaton agrees that, while fish kills are alarming, it is a cycle of nature and this season doesn’t look to be as bad or worse as other normal red tide seasons.
From the Fish and Wildlife website, they have this current report as of Oct. 25:
“.”In Southwest Florida over the past week, K. brevis was observed at background concentrations in Sarasota County, low to medium concentrations in Charlotte County, and very low to high concentrations in and/or offshore of Lee and Collier counties. Bloom concentrations (> 100,000 cells per liter) were observed in one sample from Charlotte County, 12 samples from Lee County and seven samples from and offshore of Collier County. Of these, a total of five samples from Lee and Collier counties contained high concentrations of K. brevis (>1 million cells per liter).”
The report states that red tide is all over the spectrum in Lee County. Sampling has read very low to very high, which translates to a very loose, but sometimes concentrated amount and is lower than the last major event that ended in February of this year.
Sampling efforts by the FWC continue to make sure they have the most current data.
“The interesting thing is there are tons of money and resources being put into these events, Florida Gulf Coast University has their Water School and mitigation is becoming a big part of our lives here, so I expect the overall level of knowledge about these events to only go up, and hopefully we’ll develop a way to maintain serious mitigation for them,” Eaton said.
You can keep up with the current levels of Red Tide by visiting myfwc.com/research/redtide/statewide/.