Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
The Baltimore Sun
March 20, 1998, Friday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: TELEGRAPH (NEWS), Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1345 words
HEADLINE: Fish lesions spark concern in central Florida; Organism
suspected of causing sickness among five species
BYLINE: Heather Dewar, SUN STAFF
BODY:
STUART, Fla. -- The trouble started one sunny March morning
at Wade Aycock's dock. Bending over the mirror-bright waters of
the still, slender creek behind his house, Aycock looked down
at a school of silver mullet and was horror-struck by what he
saw:
"Thousands and thousands of fish, all with lesions on
them. Deep wounds at the top of the head, above the tail, in the
middle of the back -- sometimes clear through to the spinal column.
I stood there and watched them die.
"I knew something was bad wrong," said Aycock in
the slow-moving accent of his native Virginia Tidewater. "I
had to let somebody know about this."
Now everyone in this tourist town knows what the retired funeral
director reported March 3: There's a toxic microorganism in local
waters, and it's suspected of harming the fish along with the
community's way of life.
Fishermen have caught hundreds of fish with gaping wounds --
bait fish at first, then popular varieties of sport fish and dinner-table
species, some with their bodies so eaten away that the flesh falls
apart at a touch.
In a chain of events sickeningly familiar to Chesapeake Bay-area
dwellers, the state has started a hot line and plastered bait
shops with "wanted" posters seeking samples of sick
fish. Scientists have found a close kin to Pfiesteria piscicida
in the St. Lucie River.
And though there's no evidence that whatever is killing the
fish can harm people, residents say they're afraid to fish off
their bridges, afraid to swim off their docks, afraid to eat the
fish filets stacked in their freezers.
Residents angered
Local folks are pointing fingers: at cryptoperidiniopsis, the
newly named toxic cell; at the polluted floodwaters flowing into
the St. Lucie River at the rate of 5 billion gallons a day; and
at state and federal officials who are blamed for letting things
come to such a pass.
"We demand an honest explanation in plain language,"
reads a widely circulated petition drafted by Henry Caimotto,
owner of the Snook Nook tackle shop in nearby Jensen Beach. "Platitudes,
generalities and tap dancing are not acceptable."
Scientists for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection say it will
be weeks before they know why fish are dying in the St. Lucie and the
adjacent Indian River Lagoon.
"It's a big mystery," said biologist Paul Forstchen,
a DEP fish kill investigator who calls this case the worst he's
ever seen. "It's going to be a long, exhaustive search for
an answer."
Pfiesteria parallels
Researchers are finding strong parallels to the toxic Pfiesteria
attacks that have troubled Maryland's Lower Eastern Shore since
at least 1996 -- and to other harmful algae blooms that appear
in waters worldwide about twice as often as they did 20 years
ago.
In central Florida, people say the sick fish are only the latest
symptom of an estuary that has suffered decades of environmental
insults.
"Nothing gets done about things like this until it's too
late," said Gilbert Haversperger, a Snook Nook employee.
"And then everybody says, 'Gee, what a shame.' "
A massive flood control project, built by the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers in the 1950s and 1960s, has drastically altered natural
water flows in the brackish St. Lucie and its neighboring arm
of the sea, the Indian River Lagoon.
Pollution may be a factor
A series of canals now drains a 700-square-mile swath of farmland
and subdivisions into the seven-mile river. When heavy rains fall,
the river becomes a relief valve for chronically polluted Lake
Okeechobee. Runoff flows into the lake and then into the river
from the middle one-third of Florida, with its cities, citrus
groves, sugar cane fields and cattle ranches.
This winter, record-setting rains have filled the lake past
flood stage. Cracks have appeared in its dike. Fearing a flood,
state and federal water managers opened canal locks in January,
pouring so much water into the St. Lucie that a plume of opaque
brown water flows miles out to sea.
Soon lesion-covered mullet began showing up in the estuary's
mangrove-lined creeks. Like the menhaden that succumbed to Pfiesteria
in Maryland, mullet are algae eaters. Swimming in large schools,
they seek calm waters where the one-celled plants are abundant.
Eventually, fishermen found lesions on the fish that eat the
mullet: sheepshead, jack crevalle and snook, all anglers' favorites;
and pompano, a saltwater species prized for its rich, sweet taste.
Two water samples from the St. Lucie contained cryptoperidiniopsis
(krip-to-PEAR-a-din-ee-OP-sis). The tiny dinoflagellate is so
similar to Pfiesteria that only a painstaking examination under
an electron microscope can distinguish the two, said Karen Steidinger
of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Steidinger, who identified and named "crypto," said
it is the same microorganism that turned up with Pfiesteria last
summer in Maryland's Pocomoke River. It also was found with Pfiesteria
at fish kill sites in North Carolina and on its own in a 1996
fish kill in north Florida's St. Johns River, Steidinger said.
Pfiesteria has never been found in Florida waters, she said.
JoAnn Burkholder, the North Carolina scientist who discovered
Pfiesteria, said she hasn't seen a sample of Steidinger's crypto
and can't be sure it's the same creature she tested in her lab
in the wake of the Maryland and North Carolina fish kills. If
it is the same, the microorganism is a slightly less aggressive
member of the Pfiesteria family, Burkholder said.
"It's less toxic than Pfiesteria and Pfiesteria appears
to out-compete it in most circumstances," Burkholder said.
"There could be a very, very similar species in slightly
warmer waters that's acting in almost exactly the same way."
But much about these toxic microorganisms is still unknown,
and the link between crypto and the sick fish is still no more
than a suspicion.
Paul Millar of the South Florida Water Management District
believes the fish disease is "definitely a result of the
freshwater releases to the estuary."
Tests on the floodwaters' contents have not yet been completed,
said Millar, whose agency runs the water control system. "I
don't doubt that the water coming into the estuary right now
is loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus and a lot of other stuff
-- pesticides, herbicides, urban pollution, you name it,"
he said.
If no more rains fall, it will take another two months' worth
of discharges to lower Lake Okeechobee past the danger point,
Millar said.
Fishing guides fear ruin
Local fishing guides, who charge $ 200 and up for a day's fishing
on the river, say their business will be ruined if the problem
lasts two more months. Some customers have canceled and others
are unhappy because they're catching fewer fish.
"You're tearing yourself internally, trying to decide
what is the right play," said fishing guide Warren Goral,
59. "Do you tell the client? Do you need the money? Is the
mortgage paid?
"Sunday morning, my wife emptied out the freezer of all
the fish. Yesterday, she told me to buy some rubber gloves. It
tears on you inside."
The water district is "between a rock and a hard place,"
Millar said, since there is really no good place to direct the
floodwater.
"The fishermen have got a great right to be angry,"
he said. "To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised nobody has
sued us."
Some activists say the community's economic future is imperiled.
"Everything we do here revolves around the water,"
said stockbroker Bud Jordan, president of the St. Lucie River
Initiative, an environmental group. "Now people are up in
arms. The community had no idea it was as bad as this. If you
can't do anything about it, most of us are going to move. We don't
want to live on a sewer."
Fishing guide Gregg Gentile, 45, has read the fish kill stories
from other small towns -- in Maryland, North Carolina, southwest
Florida, California and New Zealand.
"Pick whatever river, pick whatever state -- we're killing
off our fisheries," he said. "Where are you going to
run?"
Pub Date: 3/20/98
GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO, JASON NUTTLE: PALM BEACH POST, Wade Aycock, describing finding silver mullet with lesions behind his Fla. home.; COLOR MAP, SUN
STAFF, Sick fish in Florida; PHOTO, JASON NUTTLE: PALM BEACH POST,
Fatal lesions: Striped and silver mullet with open sores were
found by Wade Aycock near his Stuart, Fla., home. Scientists have
not determined the cause of the fish kills, but they are finding
strong parallels to the toxic Pfiesteria attacks that have troubled
Maryland's Lower Eastern Shore.
LOAD-DATE: March 21, 1998