Floridans demand answers to 'black water' mystery

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Commercial fishermen demand answers to 'black water' mystery

 

By CATHY ZOLLO, crzollo

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 — 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 — out to 70 or 80 feet of water north of the

Marquesas (Islands) — 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 — and other fish that entered the water —

reacted strangely.

 

"You'd see them here and there, but they were jumping and running,

not stopping — 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 — 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 — the drinking, long-term exposure to the

sun's ultraviolet rays and weeks at sea when they are never dry — is

the culprit for their infections.

 

The men won't lie about their lifestyles. They admit living from

paycheck to paycheck, partying and drinking — 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 — 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 — the swelling, fast pace

and flesh-destroying nature as reported by the fishermen — 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."