Black Water Mystery: Important, Everybody, please read,...
Papa Red
http://www.naplesnews.com/02/03/naples/d483334a.htm and,...
http://www.space.com/images/black_water_020322_02.jpg
I just recieved all of this from some of my friends,...And I think that
everybody here is South Florida should know about all of this,...Please
read it in full.
Your Friend, ~Papa Red.
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Folks, above is an areial view of the black water that is in the gulf
of mexico I am not sure if ya'll have heard about it. Its just a
little south of where I live. We just got over a bad bout of red tide
and now this. I am so concerned more for the gulf than us but I hope
they can find out what it is or a tropical storm comes by and pushes it
away from us. Heres an article about it. Funny how the commercial
fishermen are the first to cry fowl when we get blamed for everything
wrong with the envirnment. It looks to me as if its coming out of
naples florida, flowing south......
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Commercial fishermen demand answers to 'black water' mystery
Sunday, March 17, 2002 By CATHY ZOLLO, crz...@naplesnews.com
Commercial fishermen along the Southwest Florida coast are reporting a
massive dead zone that is almost devoid of marine life in an area of the
Gulf of Mexico traditionally known as a rich fishing ground. They've
dubbed it black water, and they're demanding that local, state and
national government agencies find out what's causing it. Scientists who
have heard of the phenomenon say they, too, need answers. "It's killed a
lot of the bottom because recently a lot of little bottom plants are
coming to the surface dead and rotten out in the Gulf," said Tim
Daniels, 58, a Marathon Key fish-spotting pilot who has been flying over
the Gulf for more than 20 years. Like Daniels, fishermen with decades on
the water say they've often seen red tide but they've never seen
anything like this â€" it doesn't have a foul smell, it isn't red
tide and it isn't oil. They describe it as viscous and slimy water with
what looks like spider webs in it. First sighted in January, the mass of
black-colored water reached from 20 miles north of Marathon Key halfway
to Naples. It stretched west almost 20 miles into the Gulf of Mexico.
Fishermen don't know if it's moved in from the north or offshore or if
it originated in the coastal waters off Southwest Florida. Though
somewhat smaller now than descriptions from January, the mass of water
that is still quite large is moving into the Florida Keys National
Marine Sanctuary. Created by Congress in 1990, the 2,800-square-mile
Sanctuary adjacent to the Keys is the largest coral reef in the United
States. It includes the productive waters of Florida Bay, the Gulf of
Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the ecosystem is an extensive
nursery, feeding and breeding ground that supports a variety of marine
species and a multimillion-dollar fishing industry that brings in almost
20 million pounds of seafood each year. Billy Causey, superintendent of
the Sanctuary, told the Naples Daily News recently that there is real
concern in the scientific community about the overall health of the
Gulf. Causey said contributing to the problems afflicting the shallow
body is global warming, extended periods when the Gulf waters aren't
cooling in the winter, and the growing impact of human activity along
coastlines. "What we're seeing is part of a bigger picture," Causey
said. "We're seeing accelerated problems around periods of elevated
temperatures." Those problems, beginning in the early 1980s, include
more frequent and longer lasting coral bleaching events that by 1990
were affecting stouter coral reefs closer to shore and more adapted to
wide temperature swings. "There are places that are still beautiful but
the shallow reefs would make you cry," said Causey, a Keys diver since
the 1950s. Scientists with Mote Marine Laboratory based in Sarasota said
they are aware of the black water phenomenon but hadn't yet been able to
test water samples. Erich Bartels, staff biologist at the Lab's Center
for Tropical Research in the Keys, said he'd only seen samples too old
for testing that were brought in by crabbers. "If you held it up to the
light, it had a blackish tint to it," he said. "...If you have black
water, there is something going on. It's some kind of dead zone. We just
don't know. We're trying to get samples." Mote is willing to send out
testing kits to fishermen who might encounter the black water zone, but
Bartels said in the absence of a kit, fishermen could put a sample in a
clean bottle and keep it in a cool, dark place until they could get it
to a lab. Karen Steidinger, senior biology research scientist for the
Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg, said she hadn't yet
heard about the phenomenon. She said there's a summer release of brown
water from the Shark River about 35 miles south of Marco Island, but she
doubted the black water was that. The description relayed to her from
fishermen didn't allow her to speculate on a cause. Steidinger said
samples of the water that had been properly handled would provide the
best answer.
Black water surfaces Daniels said he first noticed the black water when
he went out in mid-January, ahead of kingfish season, to see what
fishermen had in store for 2002. When he was flying over water that was
50 feet deep and north of the Keys, Daniels began to notice a change in
the water color. "I thought, 'What in the world is going on here?"'
Daniels said. "I went out to the northwest and it was solid black. And I
went to the west to get off of it â€" out to 70 or 80 feet of water
north of the Marquesas (Islands) â€" and it was still there. I came
back in and turned north of Key West and it went north. (More than)
halfway to Naples from Key West, it was black across the whole place."
Although there are almost no fish in the zone, Daniels said, the few
that fishermen found there â€" and other fish that entered the water
â€" reacted strangely. "You'd see them here and there, but they were
jumping and running, not stopping â€" and acting different," Daniels
said. "Like they didn't want to be there." Other pilots and fishermen
report the same. Mike Richardson, based out of Everglades City, has been
fish-spotting for 25 of his 50 years and said next to the normally green
water, the black water stands out like night versus day. He's quit
flying over it. "There's no sense going into it," he said. "You can't
see anything." He hasn't seen dead fish in the water, though there have
been numerous large fish kills in recent months off Southwest Florida.
Most, according to the Florida Marine Research Institute, have been
attributed to red tide â€" a naturally occurring microscopic
organism in the water. Fishermen like Howie Grimm, 42, who has been in
the business out of Everglades City since he was 15, insist the black
water isn't red tide. "It's something totally different from anything
I've seen," Grimm said. "We have to figure out what it is. There's no
fish in it. It's like dead water." Richardson, too, has seen plenty of
red tide, whose origins are still not fully understood by scientists.
"This is not like anything I've ever seen," he said. When pilots from
the air see boats move through a red tide zone, they often cut the
reddish or brownish water to reveal green below. That doesn't occur in
the black water. "This (dark) stuff goes all the way to the bottom,"
Richardson said. Boats that have 4 to 5 feet of hull below the surface
cut through 35 to 40 feet of water and leave nothing but the same black
water in their wakes. It's the same at depths of 15 feet, he said. "It
didn't matter where they ran through it, nothing left a trail,"
Richardson said. Grimm has reported the phenomenon to officials from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but said he hasn't
heard back yet. That it's affected the fishery, commercial fishermen
have no doubt. "I've net-fished for mackerel all my life," Daniels said.
"This is the first year that we haven't caught one Spanish mackerel in
the Marathon area. They're not there." The southeast corner of Florida
Bay, an area flushed by Atlantic waters, is the only place fishermen are
catching mackerel, and they're doing it with hooks and lines, he said.
Symptoms of a sick Gulf? Along with the newly discovered black water and
coral bleaching, there have been other problems with the Gulf that have
been documented for years. They include a New Jersey-sized dead zone
coming off the Mississippi River outlet to the Gulf that consumes a
larger area each summer. There are incidences of a contamination known
as fibro papiloma in green turtles that live in Florida Bay. And now
fishermen from Fort Myers Beach to the Keys wonder if there might be new
problems to worry about. They said there have been bigger fish kills
that aren't making it onto government reports. The largest, many say,
occurred late last year about 30 miles off Tampa Bay. It had shrimpers
pulling up netloads of dead and decaying fish off the bottom, they said.
Some shrimpers based on Fort Myers Beach worry that a recent and
unexplained slew of flesh-destroying infections they've seen among their
number may be related to problems in the Gulf. Charles Bruns, left, and
Willie Sherwood, both commercial fisherman out of Fort Myers Beach, have
been affected by a flesh-eating bacteria. The bacteria has been
affecting many fisherman whose home port is Fort Myers Beach. Romain
Blanquart/Staff
The infection is diagnosed as cellulitis in three of their medical
reports. They say it begins with a blister on the skin but swells to a
large nodule before it erupts and then spreads. It can only be treated
with stout antibiotics. It was mentioned by fisherman David Wellsley on
CenterPoint, a 7 a.m. Sunday radio talk show hosted by Gary Burris and
Ralf Brooks on WNOG-AM 1200 and 1270. Dan Basta, director of the
National Marine Sanctuary program, will be the guest today, along with
pilot Daniels, discussing the black water phenomenon as well as other
problems with the Gulf. Two of the Fort Myers Beach fishermen who
suffered the infections are Kevin Flanaghan, who nearly lost his foot,
and Willie Sherwood. They work for different fleets; both run out of
Fort Myers Beach. Both of them and others say there is fear among
laborers in their line of work about the infection that seems to follow
cuts doused with waters from the Gulf. Many report taking precautions
such as bleaching their gear and washing up with heavy-duty
anti-bacterial soap after pulling in their nets. The fishermen contend
it's a new phenomenon. But some boat owners and local health officials
speculated that the fishermen's compromising way of life â€" the
drinking, long-term exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays and weeks at
sea when they are never dry â€" is the culprit for their infections.
The men won't lie about their lifestyles. They admit living from
paycheck to paycheck, partying and drinking â€" then cleaning up for
the most part when they're at sea. They call it coming off the hill.
They'll work for 20 days or more catching fish â€" and then spend
the money they earn in a few days ashore. But they also say folks in
their line of work have been doing that for decades without the fear of
this sort of infection. Ray Hoggard, 49, is among the many who say the
infection is a hot topic. "It's common talk on the ship-to-ship radios,"
he said. A few times in recent weeks, boats have had to bring in for
treatment some men who were stricken. "It's a hell of a coincidence or
something's up," Hoggard said. Grant Erickson, 48, owner of Fort Myers'
Erickson and Jensen Seafood, has a fleet of eight boats. He said he,
too, hadn't seen the likes of these infections in the business that his
family has been in for a half-century. "It seems like there's something
on the bottom ... these boats (nets) drag the bottom," he said. "I don't
think it's the lifestyle of the fishermen that's changed. If anything
it's better than years past. There's nothing new except the infections."
Dr. Mark Brown, an infectious disease specialist in Naples, said without
seeing and testing the infections there is no way to identify the
organism or organisms that caused them. He said the next logical step
would be for someone to do an epidemiological study of the fishermen to
compare them to a control group to find out what's causing the
infections. Unless doctors are culturing the bug to see what it is, they
may never find out, Brown said. "They need to find out if they all have
the same bug," Brown said. "They're going to have to try harder to make
a microbiological diagnosis of what germ is causing this. . . They may
not even be looking." Health officials from Lee County, where the
affected fisherman are based, said they investigate any of more than 70
communicable diseases and any odd health-related occurrence. "We need to
gather a lot of information," said Dr. Judith Hartner, director of the
Lee County Health Department. "The first step is somebody needs to
report it." Three doctors who've seen the affected men said they didn't
culture the organism that caused the infection. Brown said the symptoms
of the infection â€" the swelling, fast pace and flesh-destroying
nature as reported by the fishermen â€" sounds like Vibrio
vulnificus, a common seagoing organism. However, he didn't speculate on
why or if it might be on the rise among fishermen. According to a Johns
Hopkins University Web site, the bug frequents areas where the water
temperature remains high throughout the year and are most abundant in
summer. The infection progresses at a rapid pace and can be fatal.
Hartner said her agency needs to answer a number of questions before
deciding if the infections warrant investigation. "Do the fishermen
think it's unusual?" she asked. "If we do an investigation and we find
out the cause, is there anything we can do to prevent it? We don't know
that it's on the rise. It could be coincidence."