Well, now three Manatee County boat ramps — as well as Anna Maria Island — will have roll-off dumpsters on-site for disposing of all the fish killed by red tide. The plan is for locals who own homes on canals to collect the dead fish from the canals and bring them to the dumpsters. Alternately, some local fishermen have offered to help homeowners clear the canals.
It's not exactly an ideal situation, but neither is red tide, and as this season's protracted red tide looms large — with no signs of abating — officials find themselves scrambling to keep the beaches and waterways clear.
How? According to the Manatee County website's update from the county's property management director Charlie Bishop, through "constant beach cleaning during daylight hours, relying on inmate labor from the Manatee and DeSoto sheriffs' offices and hiring temporary work to help."
The county has a red tide update page. The page includes a list of local fishermen willing to help clean private canals, information about how the county's currently hiring people at $12.50/hour to clean its beaches and information on emergency bridge loans for businesses in Charlotte, Collier, Hillsborough, Lee, Manatee, Pinellas and Sarasota counties impacted by red tide.
Right now, Pinellas has no signs of red tide, according to a local tow boat service CL interviewed, but as the bloom has moved north, there's no reason to expect Tampa Bay to magically guard itself from K. brevis, the red tide algae bloom unique to Florida.
While Spanish explorers (or conquistadors, depending on whether you were a Calusa or a Spaniard) wrote of fish kills in Florida, they also wrote about dragons and gold, so there's no definitive link to K. brevis before the first reported "red" tide (so named for the red — but sometimes brown — discoloration of the water that accompanied the fish (and other marine organism) kill in the 18th century. This red tide bloomed in the southern Gulf of Mexico; the first report of red tide along Florida's Gulf coast was in the 1840s.
This season's red tide differentiates itself from prior red tides because it's lasting longer than others and is also larger — as of this morning, it stretched 150 NM, from Naples to Sarasota. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, we shouldn't blame fertilizer and nutrient runoff for red tide, as the bloom tends to originate offshore, but we can blame runoff for making the red tide worse, as the bloom can feed on the runoff and expand. So, red tide might happen for reasons other than fertilizer and other agricultural runoff, but the reason it's lasting so long, growing larger by the day and doing so much damage? Yep, we can totally blame that on the runoff, although the FWC website does not implicitly state that the Lake Okeechobee discharges — which do have high levels of nutrients — that flowed west out the Caloosahatchee have helped make this year's red tide bigger and more sustained than prior years.
Hope may be on the horizon: Mote Marine has started testing an ozone treatment on water and plans to expand those tests outside the aquarium.
This article appears in Aug 9-16, 2018.