Right now, 10 to 50 miles offshore, down in the inviting waters along the edge of the Gulf of Mexico's continental shelf, Karenia brevis lurks.
The tiny speck propels itself through the water with a pair of whip-like appendages, dividing in two every few days. It survives at any Gulf temperature and thrives in salty water. It voraciously consumes whatever nutrients it can find.
It grows.
Sometime, perhaps soon, wind and ocean currents will carry K. brevis to our shore. It will flourish around inlets where it can feed from rainfall and river water. It will release neurotoxins. Fish will ingest the toxins, convulse as the poison chokes their respiratory systems, become paralyzed and die. Manatees will munch on seagrass made toxic by K. brevis; their lifeless bodies will drift into harbors and onto riverbanks.
Shellfish will pass the poison along to humans, who will suffer nausea, diarrhea, headaches, vertigo. Toxins will blow through the air and cause respiratory irritation, bronchial constriction, dizziness, tunnel vision, skin rashes. Dead fish will pile up on beaches. The stink will keep tourists away. Local news will cover the story nightly.
Red tide hasn't shown up yet in 2007, but if you've forgotten about it, just wait. K. brevis will be back.
Red tide blooms have occurred along the southwest Florida coast for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and have afflicted the area on a near-annual basis for two decades. But 2005 was different. The bloom, one of the most severe ever recorded, lasted 13 months and left behind a dead zone the size of Rhode Island. People were mystified. Questions piled up: What caused this? How can we stop it? When will it return?
Environmental groups cited research that suggested runoff carrying pollution into the Gulf was behind the bloom. Waterfront entrepreneurs urged somebody to do something quick to recover missing tourist dollars. Citizens wanted a cure. Politicians gave stump speeches. The head of Sarasota's Mote Marine Laboratory was bombarded with questions. His researchers had some answers, but they needed someone to explain what they knew and what they didn't.
When Frank Alcock moved to Sarasota to take a teaching job with New College of Florida two years before the headline-making bloom, he had no clue just how familiar he would one day become with K. brevis.
Alcock was born in Manhattan in 1969, lived in Queens and later moved upstate. He earned an economics B.A. at the SUNY campus in Binghamton, N.Y., then split for D.C., where he found a job with the Department of Energy. "[I] was representing our technical programs at the Energy Department [to the world] — coal, oil and gas, energy efficiency and also some of the nuclear weapons, high-end physics, a lot of things that Energy was doing," Alcock says. He coordinated bilateral meetings, stayed abreast of other countries' energy programs. He'd come from a policy background, but Alcock was getting his hands dirty.
He picked up a master's degree in international affairs at George Washington while in D.C. and then moved to North Carolina, where he earned a political science doctorate from Duke. After a stint as a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, New College offered him a job.
In the summer of 2005, a fellow professor at the university introduced Alcock to the head of Mote, who mentioned that his organization's strategic plan called for better efforts to connect the research being done at the marine lab to policymakers and citizens. Alcock seized on the idea. He began a sabbatical in July 2006 and devoted his time to what would become Mote's Marine Policy Institute.
The idea was to learn all he could about a particular topic, translate it into language even science-deaf politicians could grasp and then bridge the gap between researchers and decision-makers. Scientists have their own language, politicians another. Maybe Alcock could mediate.
But the institute still needed to select an initial project. Something splashy. K. brevis.
"For many reasons, red tide is not the first issue you want to work on," Alcock says, "because it's such a difficult one." Researching the blooms is tough for a couple of reasons: one, because of the intense public pressure for results, and two, because the science devoted to K. brevis remains cloudy, particularly when it comes to the thorny question of human impact.
Alcock dived in, reading science journals and meeting with experts. This past August, the Marine Policy Institute released a handy 46-page report on Florida red tide. The assessment is an easy-to-read summation of the current scientific consensus on K. brevis.
Here's what we know: K. brevis is a tiny phytoplankton that develops offshore. It survives in water ranging in temperature from 48 to 92 degrees Fahrenheit and in salinity from 24 to 37 percent. It grows slowly but is remarkably efficient, able to consume a wide range of organic and inorganic material: everything from nutrients contained in deep water to nitrogen excreted by cyanobacteria. Even rotting fish become food. Once K. brevis comes near shore, its neurotoxins can kill up to 100 tons of fish per day, poison shellfish and make humans sick. The waterfront tourist industry sees its business decline between 29 and 35 percent. Worst of all: Despite their absence this year, red tide blooms were "substantially more abundant" over the last 20 years than in decades past.
That's the consensus, but the report also offers a clear, upfront discussion of where ambiguity remains, particularly on the question of whether or not pollution is causing or exacerbating the blooms. "Much of what we know about Florida red tide casts doubt on the notion that coastal pollution can trigger the initiation of red tide blooms offshore," Alcock writes. "This does not mean that terrestrial nutrient sources are unrelated to red tide blooms. Once blooms arrive inshore, there are a number of reasons to suspect that coastal pollution can exacerbate them."
It's an elegant statement, one that acknowledges the evidence that pollution feeds red tide while refusing to confirm a causal link. Alcock is clear that while we may still lack definitive answers on red tide, lingering uncertainty should in no way halt action that will prevent coastal pollution. Even if runoff is only exacerbating the problem, not causing it, it should be curtailed.
Environmentalists may quibble with Alcock's cautious word choice when it comes to human impact, but they agree with his assessment that immediate action is necessary. "Let's do something about this now," says Marti Daltry, a regional community organizer for the Calusa Group, a southwest Florida subset of the Sierra Club.
Daltry and other environmentalists say curbing coastal pollution can begin with a few common-sense measures. Florida-friendly yards stocked with native plants require less fertilizer than lush, green lawns; less fertilizer means less nitrogen and phosphorous washed into the bay by rainfall. Low-impact development regulations lead to structures that disperse stormwater into soil and vegetation. Dog owners can pick up after their pooches.
Historically, movements toward environmental responsibility have come into conflict with profit-minded businesses. But red tide hurts the bottom line, and that's an impact recognized by politicians on both sides of the aisle.
On February 15, Republican Congressman Connie Mack, who represents parts of Charlotte and Collier counties and all of Lee County, introduced a bill in Congress called the Save Our Shores Act, which would have provided $90 million in funding for red tide research over the next three years. The bill was coauthored by Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Kathy Castor. The actual amount approved for FY 2008 eventually totaled only $8.9 million, but Buchanan's office is optimistic about getting full funding next year.
The bill's bipartisanship signals that red tide transcends the same ol' left/right, environment/profit divide. "When you get into a conflict that's ongoing for a long, long time, you almost get tacit agreement to shut out the moderates," says freshman state legislator Keith Fitzgerald, who represents parts of Sarasota and Manatee counties. Mediation between the two sides of the debate isn't always appreciated: "It's a little unsettling for people who are comfortable with the conflict."
Fitzgerald is a New College professor and participated in hiring Alcock as a teacher at the school. He sees Alcock as a consensus-builder: "He sort of challenges people who have been pitted in a struggle between the forces of dark and light."
Alcock's clear-eyed assessment has already had an impact on the debate. When Governor Crist suggested slashing $2 million in state funding for red tide research (about 40 percent of the total), Alcock heard that his report helped persuade the legislature to eventually reject the cut.
Recent developments may help realize another major need identified in Alcock's report: monitoring. "I don't think people understand how important that is," says Alcock. Every local news team has its own expensive meteorological equipment to track hurricanes, but studying the ocean doesn't receive as much attention. "We know exponentially more about what goes on in the atmosphere than what goes on below the sea level."
Good news on the monitoring front came two weeks ago, when the University of South Florida—St. Petersburg and the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute announced the creation of the Center for Prediction of Red Tides. With $1.65 million pledged over the next five years, the center will combine satellite imagery with science from across the disciplines to further study the blooms.
It's a start. "You're not going to be able to answer these questions definitely unless you're sitting on top of a bloom and monitoring it every day," says Alcock.
Alcock and the Institute are still doing work on red tide, but they are also moving beyond K. brevis and applying Alcock's motto — "linking knowledge systems into decision-making systems" — to other concerns.
At 10 a.m. on Nov. 16, the Institute convened a daylong workshop at the Venetian Golf & River Club in Venice, bringing together 21 notable policymakers and community leaders. Attendees included state representatives such as Keith Fitzgerald, field reps for Vern Buchanan and Senator Bill Nelson, county commissioners and chamber of commerce CEOs. "We are very new as an organization," says Institute Deputy Director Barbara Lausche, "and other than the red tide work, we haven't had an opportunity to do much other policy assessment, so the whole purpose of this — and it was deliberate — was that we wanted to reach out to the community and address key coastal issues."
That meant, above all, listening. The issue of red tide was broached, of course, but bigger questions were raised, questions about balancing commerce and preservation, business interests and community ones. Participants discussed pollution in Sarasota Bay, phosphate leaching, beach stabilization.
No specific measures or pledges were decided upon, but the discussion has started, and for Alcock, that's the whole point — evidence that the Institute is following through on its mission of bringing informed science to the back-and-forth of public policy.
But action, rather than conversation, requires money. "The capacity to move on these issues is dictated by the amount of resources we've been able to generate," Lausche admits.
"At the moment, it's simply me and a few other people working part-time with smoke and mirrors," Alcock says. The Institute did get a $400,000 grant this summer from the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice, keeping it above water for another two years.
As for more movement on red tide at the state level, Alcock isn't optimistic: "Within the next year or so, I don't expect any ambitious new programs." Florida's well-documented budget woes have claimed another victim, and Tallahassee isn't feeling much pressure to make red tide a priority. These days, debate over red tide is conducted at a far lower pitch and with much less urgency than during the big bloom two years ago.
Which is bad news. Because K. brevis is out there. Growing.
This article appears in Nov 28 – Dec 4, 2007.