FloridaBay – Miami Urban Green

Microplastic poses a growing concern in oceans and other aquatic habitat. (Image by 5Gyres, courtesy of Oregon State University)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes microplastics as small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long. Microplastics can takes several forms:

primary microplastics (a/k/a microbeads) that are used in the manufacture of plastic products or as abrasives in other products,
secondary microplastics which come from plastic trash breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces; and
microfibers – synthetic filaments used to make our polyester, nylon, spandex & other types of fabrics.

Whatever their form and whatever their source, microplastics pose environmental problems for wildlife and humans – and now high levels of a specific type of microplastic has been found in our Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay.

University of Florida researchers investigating algae in southern Biscayne Bay and northeast Florida Bay over the last two years made an unexpected discovery halfway through their work: high levels of tiny shards of blue-tinted microplastics.
The microplastics appeared in dense amounts, like an algae mat, that the researchers fear could be consumed by wildlife.

According to WLRN’s Jenny Staletovich, researchers were studying the affects of freshwater on the micro plankton in north Florida Bay when they found the microplastics “in amounts of 10,000 to 20,000 particles per liter”.

A material science professor who looked at the plastics identified them as polystyrene, and coming from a specific kind. Polystyrene is used to make styrofoam cups and food containers. “It’s hard to pinpoint what the plastic was, because what we’re seeing is fragments.
We’re not seeing the original plastic material. But it was very consistent,” he said. “There was one type of plastic. It wasn’t like multiple different kinds.”

With the findings, [Edward Phlips, a UF fisheries professor and lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports last month], said it might be time to add plastics monitoring and set limits.

Read the full article here: Researchers Find Potential New Threat To Biscayne And Florida Bays: Microplastics

There is a massive seagrass die-off in Florida Bay that experts say “is the latest sign we’re failing to protect the Everglades.” Since the middle of 2015, approximately 40,000-acres of the bay have been affected with dead seagrass clouding the waters and creating a perfect environment for algae blooms; and this is not the first time this has happened..

[James Fourqurean, a Florida International University marine scientist] and government Everglades experts fear they’re witnessing a serious environmental breakdown, one that gravely threatens one of North America’s most fragile and unusual wild places.

Florida Bay is located at the southern tip of the Florida mainland, and is the terminus of the Florida Everglades. Covering around 1,000 square miles, it is approximately one-third of the Everglades National Park. Florida Bay is home to bottlenose dolphins, manatees, loggerhead sea turtles, Roseate Spoonbills, and the American crocodile. It is also the source of more than $80 million in the shrimp, lobster and stone crab industries, and it’s sport’s fishing “worth $ 1.2 billion per year, according to the Everglades Foundation.” The Florida Bay estuary is fed by the fresh water system that flows through the sawgrass prairies of the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee, and it is the disruption of this fresh water flow that may be the cause of the seagrass die-off.

Fourqurean and fellow scientists think they know the cause of the die-off. It’s just the latest manifestation, they say, of the core problem that has bedeviled this system for many decades: Construction of homes, roads, and cities has choked off the flow of fresh water. Without fast moves to make the park far more resilient to climate change and rising, salty seas, the problem will steadily worsen.

“The southern Everglades, Biscayne Bay, Florida Bay are starving for water. It’s basically a permanent man-made drought, created by the drainage and development patterns to the north in the Everglades,” according to Robert Johnson, director of the National Park Service’s South Florida Natural Resources Center. “We’ve cut off the flow that historically passed through the Everglades and we’ve sent it to tide for flood control or we’ve provided it to urban and agricultural use for water supply.”

The result, he says, is a hyper-saline condition that negatively impacts Florida Bay.

In very salty conditions, waters hold little of the oxygen that seagrasses need to live. At the same time, other marine organisms turn to a different “anoxic” process – one that goes forward without oxygen – that has a nasty by-product: hydrogen sulfide.

The chemical “is a notorious toxin,” said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “It kills life, including human.”

And that’s just the beginning. Once the seagrass dies off, it becomes a feedback – the water becomes filled with dead grasses that release nutrients, and those can stoke huge algal blooms (which happened the last time around, but so far have not appeared en masse). That clouds the water and prevents light from reaching remaining seagrasses, which then also die, because they need the light for photosynthesis.

Sally Jewell, US Secretary of the Interior, and Pedro Ramos, Superintendent of Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks, in the Florida Bay (Photo credit: Angel Valentin 2016-04-22)

Other scientists blame fertilizer runoffs from large-scale agribusinesses like “Big Sugar” for creating the algae blooms “on which bacteria feed, grow and then consume all the oxygen in the water. Further microbes thrive in this oxygen free environment, but produce toxic gases where nothing grows.”

Whatever the exact cause, it’s a man-made problem, and we need to fix it.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell recently visited Everglades National Park, plucked dead seagrass from Florida Bay, and told reporters, “This is what we get when we don’t take care of Florida Bay.”

For more on this story, be sure to read Chris Mooney’s full article in The Washington Post.

Posts Tagged with FloridaBay

FIU Researchers Find Microplastics in Biscayne Bay & Florida Bay

“This is what we get when we don’t take care of Florida Bay”