Speaking rapidly to Ransom as I dropped fish overboard, I said, “That makes five… six… seven French grunts… yeah, that’s all of them. So now we’ll start on file fish and sea horses. There might be a couple of pipe fish in there, too. That should be.. . Clipboard C. Ready?”
She was looking at the chart. “No, man, no, you wrong, that make nine French grunts. You miscounted, plus there’s one right there by Mr. Thomas’ knee. I can see the tail.”
Tomlinson and I were down on the deck, using our hands to cull through the thigh-high piles of grass and clumps of tunicates, searching for more life. My left arm was feeling pretty good. The more I used it, the better it felt.
“She’s right,” said Tomlinson as he held up the candy-colored fish. He slid it back into the water and watched it swim away. “Nine French grunts it is.”
I told her, “Good job, way to keep track. Tell us when you’re ready for the sea horses. That’ll leave the tunicates and the soft sponges, then we’re finished for the day.”
Not finished with the survey-my contract called for three seasonal replicates, all to be done with cast net and otter trawls like the two I was using. I refuse to use threepanneled trammel nets anymore because they are too deadly, too destructive and there’s too much chance of them being lost, sinking and killing fish for years afterward.
Over the years, I’ve refined my own survey technique: Count the number of fish and the number of species from several specific habitats around an island-I’d already documented 237 different species around Guava Key. Calculate respective totals. Then use aerial photos to measure the various acres of habitat in the adjoining water space, and multiply acreage by the number and species of animals found in similar areas.
Much of it is subjective judgment. You have to make considerations for mechanical biases: The size of net mesh, the speed of the boat. For instance, my slow trawler with its large meshed net is never going to catch a mature tarpon nor a microscopic tarpon larva-but that doesn’t mean they don’t both live in the waters around Guava Key. They certainly do.
Once I consider all the data I’ve collected and match figures from other regions, it’s not difficult to make an objective summary about the health of a body of water and its sea bottom.
From everything I’d seen over the last week, the bays around Guava Key were still healthy enough to be productive, but there were some danger signs. The water seemed unusually murky for February-it had a green turbidity, not the tannin-amber color normally associated with mangrove back country.
Curious, I’d checked the local telephone book. There were more than a hundred public and private golf courses listed in the county that adjoined the bay. My Florida atlas was more specific: Of those one hundred courses, more than a dozen of them were boundaried by brackish water rivers and creeks that flowed directly into the bay.
I’d thought the numbers must have been a misprint until I called several fellow biologists around the state. It turned out that most coastal counties in Florida have at least that many courses, and some of the bigger, tourism-driven counties have far more.
Nothing against golf. I’ve played enough to appreciate the artistry of a well-designed course, and I wish I had the coordination to be good at the game. I also agree that golf courses are correctly considered green space preserve areas by state planners-but the problem is, what does it take to keep them green?
In Florida it takes fertilizer. Tons and tons of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus. Much of that fertilizer is not absorbed by fairway grasses. It washes off into water hazards and the water hazards drain into creeks, the creeks into rivers, and rivers drain into bays. In all brackish and saltwater live, suspended, myriad species of microscopic plant life, or phytoplankton. Microscopic plants react to fertilizer in the same way Bermuda grass does-they turn a bright, rich green.
That’s great for a golf course, but terrible for a bay. When water turns murky, the depth that sunlight can penetrate is reduced. If sunlight does not reach the sea bottom, sea grasses cannot grow. Sea grass is the perfect habitat for the shrimp and crabs on which game fish such as sea trout, redfish, and snook depend. Filtering species such as tunicates and sponges also use sea grass as a necessary anchor.
If murky water kills the sea meadows, then shrimp, crabs, and fish are eliminated as well, along with the very filtering animals required to make the bay clear and healthy again.
It is a hugely destructive intrusion that needs to be taken seriously, yet state bureaucrats spend far more time and money thwarting private homeowners from building docks (which provide excellent underwater habitat) and trying to implement such pointless boondoggles as manatee idle zones. The idle zones can’t be enforced and, worse, will have negligible effect on manatee fatalities because of the simple fact that the draft of a vessel is often more problematic than a vessel’s speed.
There are many fine, intelligent state-employed bureaucrats and biologists working in Florida, but the mandates they receive, and the objectives with which they are charged have, historically, been tragically shortsighted or misdirected.
The woman said, “We get back, I’m gonna fry up some of that conch, what you men think? Catch me a nice snapper, I’ll make that, too, with johnnycakes and some good fish gravy.” Ransom was talking while she studied her clipboards. Apparently, she was adding up numbers without having to be told. I liked that.
Tomlinson was still shoveling his hands through mounds of grass. “How ’bout you let us buy you lunch at the Tarpon Lodge? That old restaurant on the hill.”
She smiled, still calculating. “Oh man, I like the sound ’a that, but I don’t have no clothes for a place so fancy. I got me a pair of jeans, a lil’ ol’ black skirt, but nothing good enough for rich man’s place.”
Tomlinson said, “Oh, baloney-excuse my language. See what I’m wearing?” He touched the sleeve of his tattered, hibiscus-pink Hawaiian shirt before plunging his hands back into the pile. “We’re on an island. This is considered formal wear. Pair of flipflops and cutoffs, you can go anywhere but a funeral, which they don’t have out here anyway. They don’t have funerals because the rules don’t allow members to die while on club property. So when we get ashore… awwww-OUCH!”
Tomlinson’s scream was oddly high-pitched, so feminine that I would have laughed had he not tumbled hard over onto his side, holding his right hand as if he’d been stabbed.
The woman and I were both immediately beside him, helping him up. He was breathing hard; seemed a little dazed and was still holding his wrist. “I just got the shit shocked out of me! Like there’s a fucking 220-volt line in there!” He was staring at the last pile of grass and gumbo, but wary of it, keeping his distance.
I looked at his hand. No puncture wounds, no blood, but it was streaked with red.
“Damn, that hurt! ”
I was on my knees again. I had the little wooden-handled dip net, searching through the grass. At first, I thought he’d grabbed a saltwater catfish or stingray-unassertive animals with painful defensive systems. A stingray’s spine has serrated edges and two groves that run the length of it, venomous glands in each. A thin layer of skin called the integumentary sheath covers the spine, and a complicated proteinous toxin is released when that sheath ruptures upon penetration. I stepped on a small stingray once, and it took all my resolve not to sit down and bawl like a baby.
Saltwater catfish are almost as bad. Their dorsal and lateral fins are serrated like double-edged saws, and the slimy venom secreted from axillary glands in the sheaths of their spines is an extremely painful protein-based poison. Because there was no puncture mark on Tomlinson’s hand, though, I figured he’d grabbed some kind of jellyfish-the stinging nematocysts of a Portuguese man-o’war, in sufficient number, are potent enough to hospitalize a grown man.