20
THE SUN
OUTDOORS
JANUARY 5, 2022
A New Year’s resolution Reel Time RUSTY CHINNIS
I
’m guessing that when it comes to making and keeping New Year’s resolutions, your average isn’t much better than mine. When I look back, I don’t sweat most of them. Resolutions like losing weight or exercising more aren’t so critical. Then there are other resolutions that one just can’t take for granted or put on hold anymore. The resolution to work to protect the habitat and water quality of the Suncoast rises to that level. If you think that’s an overstatement, I encourage you to speak to any one of the professional fishing guides, like Captain Justin Moore, a secondgeneration guide on Anna Maria Island who spends more than 200 days on the water every year. As a keen observer by trade and nature, Moore is alarmed with what he’s seeing. It was Moore and his dad, Captain Scott Moore, who first alerted me to the fact that vast stretches of Sarasota Bay had lost seagrasses after the devastating red tide of 2018. How did they know almost a year before the official notice was released by the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program? They saw it with their own eyes. Thousands of acres of lush grasses that they had fished for decades were suddenly just bare sand. I heard the same concerns from veteran anglers like Captain Todd Romine, who has been fishing Sarasota
RUSTY CHINNIS | SUN
Lyngbya blocks a kayaker from entering Robinson Preserve in 2021. Bay for more than three decades. Romine was so concerned he sacrificed a day of fishing to take Sarasota Bay Estuary Program Executive Director Dave Tomasko to show him. Tomasko made an initial determination that grass beds that had been in water 5 feet or deeper were essentially gone. This was six months before the results from the Southwest Florida Water Management District seagrass survey documented an 18% decline in seagrass across Sarasota Bay, Roberts Bay and Little Sarasota Bay from 2018 to 2020. The decline equates to a loss of 2,300 acres of seagrass. The total acreage of seagrass coverage in the area is down from 12,853 in 2018 to 10,540 in 2020. By comparison, seagrasses in the 1950s covered about 10,246 acres, a low after dredge and fill operations and sewage systems devastated a once-vi-
brant ecosystem. The coverage steadily built from there as municipalities converted to central sewer systems and stormwater runoff began to be managed. Now the loss we’ve experienced in two years means the area basically has to start over. Tampa Bay, linked directly to Anna Maria Sound, didn’t fare much better, losing 13% of its seagrass, more than 5,400 acres. When you consider that 2.5 acres of seagrass supports up to 100,000 fish and 100 million invertebrates like clams, crabs, starfish and snails, the impact of the loss becomes more evident.
If that wasn’t enough to alarm observers of the bay, the debacle at Piney Point - which released more than 200 million gallons of phosphate process wastewater into Tampa Bay in the spring of 2021 - should have been. That release likely led to the most devastating red tide event in upper Tampa Bay in more than 30 years, killing more than 1,711 tons of sea life. On top of these devastating events, two years of massive and unprecedented lyngbya (cyanobacteria) blooms in Anna Maria Sound and Tampa Bay in 2020 and 2021 blanketed thousands of acres of seagrass with a foul-smelling mass that blocked life-giving light. While local waters have become clear as they cool during the winter, keen observers will notice that the bay is still choked with a variety of algae. Why is that a problem? For an answer, we only have to look to the east coast of Florida SEE REEL TIME, PAGE 21
