South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
RESTORING THE RIVER
As manatees die, job of fixing Indian River ecology comes to life
Nursing the morbidly sick Indian River Lagoon into what it had been, a paradise of scallops, turtles, manatees, seagrass meadows and more, promises to be hard beyond ready comprehension.
This past week, a team of professional aquatic gardeners provided a glimpse of the difficulties. Wasting little motion, the five team members planted grasses on the bottom of Turkey Creek near where it flows into the lagoon in Palm Bay.
The creek was dark to begin with and each step they took churned up muck plumes as opaque as a double espresso pull and ejected a mild waft of sulfur fumes. They had to reach down deeply with plants so that the rich water rose to just below their mouths.
The team was focused and practiced, running through 500 pots of plants in less than an hour. That was the easy part.
Harder: each little pot with a modest clump of grass sprouts cost $600.
The price includes cultivating the grasses in a nursery, planting and protecting them under steel cages about the size of an ottoman, and tending regularly to their growth for a year.
“We have to be successful,” said Heather Herold, chief sales and marketing officer for Sea & Shoreline, a for-profit aquatic restoration company based in Winter Garden. “We will be here every month, making sure the plants are doing well.”
Virginia Barker, director of Brevard County’s natural resource department, stopped by as the work was beginning. She lives and breathes the Indian River’s disastrous decline and efforts to restore its health.
There is a sense of a wild frontier of new funding rushing in from a county tax increase, state and federal contributions, grants and donations, all underwriting time-tested remedies as well as innovative and unproven approaches coming from private, government, academic, advocacy and nonprofit organizations.
The projects span pollution reduction, dredging, research and monitoring and reviving grasses, the foundation of the river’s ecosystem.
The pressure to succeed quickly can be measured in Brevard’s manatee deaths: hundreds annually now because their preferred food, underwater grass, is all but gone.
It took decades of sewage and stormwater pollution to break Brevard County’s celebrated environment.
“We are not going to plant 40,000 acres of seagrass overnight,” Barker said.
This past week, state and federal wildlife authorities acknowledged again that grass recovery sufficient enough to stem the die-off of manatees will take years.
A partnership of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is ready to repeat last winter’s emergency feeding of manatees from a dock at a Florida Power & Light Co. power plant.
The electric plant, at the west shore of the Indian River south of Titusville, discharges warm water that attracts sometimes more than 1,000 manatees.
Last winter, the partnership hand fed 200,000 pounds of lettuce to manatees at the electric plant primarily from January through March. Experts aren’t sure how much good the unprecedented measure did for the animals’ health.
At SeaWorld Orlando, the mammals typically are given more than 100 pounds of romaine lettuce daily. At that rate, 200,000 pounds would sustain 100 manatees for three weeks.
Also casting uncertainty on results of the emergency feeding is the death count, which may be unchanged.
Through Nov. 11 this year, the toll in Brevard is at 339 and, with weather cooling in November and December, could catch up to last year’s toll of 358. Last December, 22 dead manatees were counted.
The emergency feeding program will try to boost the amount of romaine and butter lettuce distributed to 400,000 pounds this winter, according to the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, a nonprofit group supporting the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
With proceeds from donations, the foundation at wildlifeflorida.org covered last winter’s lettuce cost at nearly $170,000 and is securing further donations for this winter.
SeaWorld’s caregivers say manatees are incredibly tough and able to withstand severe starvation.
Manatees also are adaptable, biologists say, willing to eat St. Augustine grass, pull down mangrove leaves and consume seaweed.
“In the Keys, some manatees will actually grab fish carcasses and chew on them every now and then,” said Tom Reinert, spokesperson for the state wildlife commission. “It’s kind of a weird behavior, maybe a mineral thing, we are not sure.”
Reinert said “their preferred diet is submerged aquatic vegetation, either
seagrasses or some of the freshwater grasses.”
The Sea & Shoreline crew at Turkey Creek planted both types: 333 pots of freshwater eelgrass and 167 pots of seagrass called widgeon.
As head of Brevard’s natural resources department, Barker is pushing for a uniform methodology for planting aquatic grasses to make sure the right kind is planted in the right place with the right sediment and water conditions and with the right performance standards.
She wasn’t entirely confident of the Turkey Creek location because of its murkiness and mix of salty and fresh water that may work against survival of either eelgrass or seagrass.
But the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission picked the site as “the best shot we think we’ve got,” commission biologist Joel Andras said. And
Brevard County isn’t paying for the plantings.
The $300,000 cost is being split by the Sea & Shoreline and Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida.
Ideally, said the Sea & Shoreline project biologist, Katie Kramer, the individual plants will spread to create a meadow of grasses and provide a new place of grazing for manatees.
If that happens, an additional payoff would be from the grasses solidifying Turkey Creek’s mucky bottom and clarifying its water.
The company already has more than a million plantings in Florida waters, including demonstration projects in Fort Pierce Inlet State Park and the Banana River, both part of the Indian River Lagoon.
“We’ve got our system down,” Kramer said.