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SANIBEL
Empty, barren and filled with dead sea animals.
This is what researchers call a dead zone, and it's here in southwest Florida.
But this is not the case for the Edison Reef last summer.
"When we dive into Edison Reef on Tuesday, we did not see anything," said Rick Bartleson, Water Quality Specialist at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.
Nothing but blankets of wild animals, according to Bob Wosno, resource coordinator for the Gulf Coast of Florida.
"Everything was absolutely dead, the sea urchin crabs, clams, corals on the structure itself," said Bartleson.
Dead marine life descending to the bottom of the Gulf contributes to what researchers call a dead zone.
"The hypoxic areas are essentially areas devoid of oxygen," Bartleson said.
The dead fish along the shore actually absorb oxygen from the water.
"Thanks to the decomposition, all this bacteria that consumes fish and dead cells, it sucks oxygen right out of the water," Bartleson said.
In a recent dive, they found what could be a large dead zone.
"We have not seen oxygen around Captiva and no oxygen around the southwest side of Sanibel," Bartleson said.
Researchers say the prolonged proliferation of this year's red tides could worsen the dead zone.
Dove Edison Reef yesterday with Bob Wasno and Shannon Liber. Normally, the reef is a marine magnet, loaded with goliath grouper, mangrove snapper, snook, pork, barracuda, tomato, damselfly, angelfish, pufferfish and many invertebrate species. , victim of our red tide: In 45 minutes on the reef, I saw a total of six fish: three snappers and three mangroves. We also saw many dead crabs, dead sand dollars, dead tunicates, dead brittle stars, dead sea urchins, dead sponges, dead coral and many dead mollusc species. The Lee County artificial reef looks like. The last minute is yesterday's ghost reef.
Posted by Kevin Lollar on Thursday, August 30, 2018
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