Initial Reports
February 22, 2013
A crisp chill sang through the air on a steady sea breeze as I walked across the wooden bridge separating the barrier island from Round Island on the Indian River Lagoon (IRL). The air was cool enough to make me reflexively warm my hands in my pockets before I continued to the midpoint of the bridge. Not that south Florida can ever truly be considered cold by the standards of most people. Slightly above 50 degrees and sunny isn’t exactly “brace yourself for the apocalypse” weather.
Still, there was something unseen, almost halting in the air. If I had only known what was to come in the months ahead I might have taken my time there. Round Island is my “go-to” spot for photographing and filming Florida manatees. A resident group of nearly three dozen or so sea cows stay in the general vicinity of the tiny island park. The usually warm, brackish waters of the lagoon provide a natural shelter and semi-peaceful home for the marine mammals.
It was, as I had come to deem any day without a manatee sighting, a slow day. I paused for a while atop the bridge and then headed below it to get a waterline look.
At first glance Round Island doesn’t seem much different than any Florida intracoastal area. Ringed with mangroves and dotted with tiny islands, the area surrounding the park is idyllic in its serenity but fairly mundane-looking to the untrained eye.
You just have to know where to look. Scanning the opposite shore, looking through my camera’s telephoto lens, I could see four ospreys perched on barren branches. Below them, a collection of brown pelicans and a couple of ibis filled the lower tiers of the mangrove branches. To my right, nearly a football field’s length away, the occasional dorsal fin of a dolphin surfaced. In the water just past my feet several silver-colored fish darted by and, a moment later, a stingray gracefully flapped through the shallows, feeding on minnows. A river otter made a quick splash into the water down a muddy slide hidden below the foliage.
Indian River Lagoon is acknowledged by many biologists as the most bio-diverse estuary in North America. Within its waters are hundreds of millions of animals and millions of plants that coexist interdependent on each other for their health and survival. The plethora of wildlife to be seen around its waters was one of the main reasons I chose to live in the area.
After an hour, I decided this would be a “no manatee” day and called it like an emergency room doctor might call out the time of death for a lost patient. “9:25 a.m.,” I thought to myself. “No manatees sighted.”
In retrospect I should have picked up on the oddity of it. I had previously made more than 50 trips to Round Island and only twice had I left without sighting a single manatee. But it was cold – well Florida’s version of cold anyway—and it was likely the manatees (which are warm-blooded mammals) had made their way south to warmer waters.
One morning, about a week or so after my trip out to Round Island, a darker possibility for the lack of manatees emerged. My morning ritual includes scanning online news sources for topics that interest me. I didn’t have to look too deeply to peak my interest, though. Google News was flush with headlines stating that hundreds of manatees had mysteriously died around Florida since the start of 2013. I searched out other news articles online and was met with story after story of scores of dead manatees being found floating dead in Florida waters.
In the following weeks the pace of the die-off quickened. It was the ferocity of the “hidden” killer that captured media attention from the outset. On screen or in print the old villain, “Red Tide,” twirled his evil mustache and media outlets were quick to “boo” and “hiss” accordingly.
It was a two-week news cycle. It was a cycle without answers, only new questions, dire predictions and sound bites.
The concern was genuine enough. The phrase “gentle giants” found its way into every news report. Ostensibly, no one wants to see manatees harmed or dying by the hundreds. That’s why it made national headlines. That’s why the die-off mattered to folks living in Indiana or Sweden.
But, after a few weeks of rehashing red tide theories and showing footage of bloated manatee carcasses, the mass media had its fill and moved on to more important things like reality television starlets having children with pop singers.
The IRL is my backyard, though, and it wasn’t something I wanted to ignore. So, I started to find experts to talk to, people who know what’s really going on, and decided to put together a short documentary about the issue. I hoped maybe it would help keep a spotlight on the manatees just long enough to codify folks into helping them… or maybe it would inspire people to ask the real questions about how the toxic algae blooms happened in the first place.
The idea to create a documentary grew to include five fellow film students from Indian River State College and the support of Dr. Matt Brooks, our mass communications professor. The genesis of that project became “Saving Sirenia: Manatees in Crisis,” a non-commercial website and show aimed at keeping the story alive. The resulting interviews, research and my personal observations coalesced into this story.
In essence, this is the story of what I’ve learned while on the trail of a silent killer and about the “henchmen” who do its dirty work. It’s also about the 340 million accomplices, including myself, who live in the United States.
It’s both a complex story and one that has more moving parts to it than a printing press. Also, “villains” are really not villains and “heroes,” well there are subtle shades of those, too. The longer you spend trying to find a person, company or group to point fingers at; the more fingers begin to point right back at you.
By the end of February one thing was crystal clear… the die-off was in full swing.
February 22, 2013
A crisp chill sang through the air on a steady sea breeze as I walked across the wooden bridge separating the barrier island from Round Island on the Indian River Lagoon (IRL). The air was cool enough to make me reflexively warm my hands in my pockets before I continued to the midpoint of the bridge. Not that south Florida can ever truly be considered cold by the standards of most people. Slightly above 50 degrees and sunny isn’t exactly “brace yourself for the apocalypse” weather.
Still, there was something unseen, almost halting in the air. If I had only known what was to come in the months ahead I might have taken my time there. Round Island is my “go-to” spot for photographing and filming Florida manatees. A resident group of nearly three dozen or so sea cows stay in the general vicinity of the tiny island park. The usually warm, brackish waters of the lagoon provide a natural shelter and semi-peaceful home for the marine mammals.
It was, as I had come to deem any day without a manatee sighting, a slow day. I paused for a while atop the bridge and then headed below it to get a waterline look.
At first glance Round Island doesn’t seem much different than any Florida intracoastal area. Ringed with mangroves and dotted with tiny islands, the area surrounding the park is idyllic in its serenity but fairly mundane-looking to the untrained eye.
You just have to know where to look. Scanning the opposite shore, looking through my camera’s telephoto lens, I could see four ospreys perched on barren branches. Below them, a collection of brown pelicans and a couple of ibis filled the lower tiers of the mangrove branches. To my right, nearly a football field’s length away, the occasional dorsal fin of a dolphin surfaced. In the water just past my feet several silver-colored fish darted by and, a moment later, a stingray gracefully flapped through the shallows, feeding on minnows. A river otter made a quick splash into the water down a muddy slide hidden below the foliage.
Indian River Lagoon is acknowledged by many biologists as the most bio-diverse estuary in North America. Within its waters are hundreds of millions of animals and millions of plants that coexist interdependent on each other for their health and survival. The plethora of wildlife to be seen around its waters was one of the main reasons I chose to live in the area.
After an hour, I decided this would be a “no manatee” day and called it like an emergency room doctor might call out the time of death for a lost patient. “9:25 a.m.,” I thought to myself. “No manatees sighted.”
In retrospect I should have picked up on the oddity of it. I had previously made more than 50 trips to Round Island and only twice had I left without sighting a single manatee. But it was cold – well Florida’s version of cold anyway—and it was likely the manatees (which are warm-blooded mammals) had made their way south to warmer waters.
One morning, about a week or so after my trip out to Round Island, a darker possibility for the lack of manatees emerged. My morning ritual includes scanning online news sources for topics that interest me. I didn’t have to look too deeply to peak my interest, though. Google News was flush with headlines stating that hundreds of manatees had mysteriously died around Florida since the start of 2013. I searched out other news articles online and was met with story after story of scores of dead manatees being found floating dead in Florida waters.
In the following weeks the pace of the die-off quickened. It was the ferocity of the “hidden” killer that captured media attention from the outset. On screen or in print the old villain, “Red Tide,” twirled his evil mustache and media outlets were quick to “boo” and “hiss” accordingly.
It was a two-week news cycle. It was a cycle without answers, only new questions, dire predictions and sound bites.
The concern was genuine enough. The phrase “gentle giants” found its way into every news report. Ostensibly, no one wants to see manatees harmed or dying by the hundreds. That’s why it made national headlines. That’s why the die-off mattered to folks living in Indiana or Sweden.
But, after a few weeks of rehashing red tide theories and showing footage of bloated manatee carcasses, the mass media had its fill and moved on to more important things like reality television starlets having children with pop singers.
The IRL is my backyard, though, and it wasn’t something I wanted to ignore. So, I started to find experts to talk to, people who know what’s really going on, and decided to put together a short documentary about the issue. I hoped maybe it would help keep a spotlight on the manatees just long enough to codify folks into helping them… or maybe it would inspire people to ask the real questions about how the toxic algae blooms happened in the first place.
The idea to create a documentary grew to include five fellow film students from Indian River State College and the support of Dr. Matt Brooks, our mass communications professor. The genesis of that project became “Saving Sirenia: Manatees in Crisis,” a non-commercial website and show aimed at keeping the story alive. The resulting interviews, research and my personal observations coalesced into this story.
In essence, this is the story of what I’ve learned while on the trail of a silent killer and about the “henchmen” who do its dirty work. It’s also about the 340 million accomplices, including myself, who live in the United States.
It’s both a complex story and one that has more moving parts to it than a printing press. Also, “villains” are really not villains and “heroes,” well there are subtle shades of those, too. The longer you spend trying to find a person, company or group to point fingers at; the more fingers begin to point right back at you.
By the end of February one thing was crystal clear… the die-off was in full swing.