TITLE: Sick fish back in spotlight Outbreaks reported as early as 1950s
BYLINE: Steve Patterson, Times-Union staff writer
EST. PAGES: 1
DATE: 09/21/97
DOCID: JFTU64887
SOURCE: The Florida Times-Union; JFTU
EDITION: CITY; SECTION: NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL; PAGE: A-1
(Copyright 1997)
Dying fish littered the St. Johns River. Fishermen were scared.The
press was buzzing.
Then people's attention wandered. And a drumbeat of public
concern went quiet for a decade, as people forgot that, in the
1980s, something in Jacksonville's water was killing fish and
causing ugly, red sores.
The fish sickness is making headlines again this year, but
it's just a reprise.
"It's not something that's gone away. What happened, I
think, is the publicity died down," said Carole DeMort, a
University of North Florida biologist who worked with scientists
from Virginia and North Carolina researching similar fish lesions
in the 1980s.
"I get calls every year," said DeMort, who saw her
last fish lesion in July. "I get calls from sports fishermen
who have caught these fish with big ulcers, and they're asking
if they can eat it. . . . Common sense would tell me you shouldn't."
After a spree of studies -- Florida alone allotted $250,000
for research in 1986 -- the scientists gave the problem a name,
Ulcerated Disease Syndrome.
But they could find no single cause, and moved on to new subjects
when they ran out of research money.
"It slipped into the long list of problems observed, problems
studied but problems not well understood," said Bill Hargis
Jr., a retired marine parasite researcher at the Virginia Institute
of Marine Science.
The prime suspect in the outbreaks may be a nameless, one-celled organism scientists discovered in the river this summer, one similar to the toxic Pfiesteria piscicida blamed for a billion
fish deaths in North Carolina.
The St. Johns microbe -- it has no formal name yet -- has been
found at fish kills in Maryland and North Carolina, and DeMort
said the creature "seems to be in the water all the time,
from what we can tell."
Outbreaks of diseased fish had been reported in Northeast Florida
as early as the 1950s, a state official told City Council members
in 1985, a year after the lesions suddenly became widespread.
Some change in the river is thought to trigger the organism's
effectiveness. Scientists in the 1980s concluded that change might
be increased pollution or other factors that wear down fish immune
systems.
DeMort said attention in Jacksonville may have wandered because
commercial fishermen, who were vocal in their concern about the
disease, have been increasingly restricted from working inland
waterways.
"It went away," she said, "from the point of
view of politics."
This report contains information from Knight-Tribune News Service.
ART: Photo; Staff/file Photo: (c) In the 1980s, something in Jacksonville's water was killing fish and causing ugly, red sores. The fish sickness is back, but it's just a reprise.
DESCRIPTORS: fish; St. Johns River; disease