Guest Opinion: Silence of science on red tide

As a longtime environmental advocate and author, I am familiar with the complexity of events such as the harmful algal blooms (HABs) currently afflicting the Florida Gulf Coast and the Indian River Lagoon. I am also familiar with the carefully nurtured objectivity among scientists and researchers that absolves them from having to offer policy guidance.

Twenty years ago, in the Hudson Valley, as executive director of a 20,000-member environmental group called Clearwater, I participated in a number of discussions on the issue of objectivity, in formal and informal settings, with scientists and academics from the many distinguished institutions in the region.

From those discussions and conference breakouts there emerged a clear consensus that scientists want their work to have meaning, and to drive meaningful policy. Scientists have opinions, and know what needs to be done to effect change.

Read more: Complete coverage of red tide in Southwest Florida

It is the managers of these institutions, their sponsors and often elected officials who prefer science to remain silent on controversial matters. Seems counterintuitive, since science can dispel controversy.

I was pleased to see Dr. Michael P. Crosby, president and CEO of Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, in his Aug. 17 guest column, mention the possibility of anthropogenic nutrient inputs influencing the proliferation of toxic blue-green algae flowing toward both coasts from Lake Okeechobee.

But when he states, unequivocally, “The ongoing red tide bloom is a naturally occurring cyclic event that is not initiated by outflows from Lake Okeechobee, nor inputs from the Caloosahatchee River,” I have to respectfully challenge — or perhaps clarify — that hypothesis.

The blue-green algae is a freshwater organism. It dies when the ambient salinity reaches a certain level. When it dies, it is consumed by detrivores that themselves excrete wastes and die, thereby making staggering quantities of phosphorus and nitrogen bio-available — food for karenia brevis, the red tide organism.

“The greatest nutrient sources [of k. brevis blooms] were the decay and recycling of the cyanobacteria (blue-green alga) Trichodesmium” (National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, 2013).

When Crosby asserts that great volumes of red-tide food flowing out of the Caloosahatchee would not “initiate a bloom,” and yet states elsewhere that a red-tide bloom is “fueled” by nutrients from “numerous creeks and rivers,” it feels as if his messaging is tripping over itself. The public deserves better than messaging.

Furthermore, while red tide may be a cyclical event, it has never killed marine mammals on this scale before.

The massacre began on the next agricultural cycle after the passage of Senate Bill 552 in the Florida Legislature in January 2016. That ill-conceived bill was Gov. Rick Scott’s business-friendly creation. It made Big Agriculture happy, but turned springs brown and almost immediately resulted in mats of blue-green algae laying waste to some of the nation’s finest estuaries — “fueling” one of the worst red tides in history.

In science, concurrency is not causation. But with our cherished marine mammals — the very animals that Dr. Crosby’s institution is widely thought to protect — dying by the hundreds, it is just not good enough to say: It’s complicated.

I challenge Dr. Crosby and his institution, and all its partners — including the Mosaic Company, which strip-mines and processes millions of tons of phosphatic nutrients in the headwaters of most of the region’s major rivers — to develop and implement a peer-reviewed study looking directly at the relationships between HAB events and anthropogenic nutrient inputs flowing south into Lake Okeechobee and west into the Charlotte Harbor estuary (via the Peace, Myakka and Caloosahatchee rivers).

The state of Florida is in a full-blown, but largely preventable, water crisis.

I challenge the voters of Florida to vote out the legislators who passed Senate Bill 552, for starters. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out who to send home: The bill passed unanimously in the Senate and only two House members opposed it.

If our scientific and academic institutions won’t step up, the people can give it their best shot. I hope they will.

Andy Mele is the Suncoast Waterkeeper, part of the global Waterkeeper Alliance. His mission is to protect and restore the waterways of Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties through enforcement, field work, advocacy and environmental education. Mele has an MS in environmental science from Bard College. Web: www.suncoastwaterkeeper.com

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