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Twelve years after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, bottlenose dolphins continue to face heart and lung conditions, low reproductive success and other devastating health impacts. But the disaster also led to unprecedented innovations and insights in dolphin science. Researchers say that investing in science before the next emergency will better prepare us for inevitable future pollution threats to dolphins — and ourselves.

Salty Louisiana wind whips through Forrest Gomez’s hair as her team’s motorboat bumps across the warm waves of Barataria Bay. The inflatable black Zodiak suddenly ker-chunks to a halt beside a small fleet of other research vessels, all outfitted as floating labs.

The scientists from one boat hurl a net into the water. The net trailing behind, they drive in slow circles to capture their study subject: a bottlenose dolphin. 

“GO, JUMP NOW,” someone yells. More than sixty marine mammal vets and assistants splash over the sides of the boats into the shoulder-deep water. They lug instruments behind them as they wade toward the dolphin.

Dodging splashes from its muscular tail, Gomez and the crew untangle the animal and position it between them, ready to perform a slew of tests to assess its health.

Wildlife in Barataria Bay, in southeastern Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, were some of the hardest hit by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Close to 200 million gallons of oil, an amount that could fill 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools, seeped into the Gulf after a BP drilling rig exploded, making it one of the worst ecological disasters in U.S. history. 

Gomez, director of medicine for the National Marine Mammal Foundation, has used floating ultrasound machines to investigate how Barataria Bay dolphin mothers have fared since the spill.

She is clad in chunky goggles and a thick black hood so she can see her screen despite the intense sun. On it: a scan of an unborn baby dolphin. Water makes it easy to get clear images, equivalent to the gel used on pregnant human mothers’ bellies.

Dolphins, along with whales and porpoises, are among the marine mammals known as “Cetacea,” which carry offspring in the womb and give birth to live babies. Research shows that dolphins after the spill had successful pregnancies only about one-fifth of the time — very low compared to the two-thirds in healthy comparison populations. Scientists think oil could have weakened the dolphins’ stress responses, immune systems and lungs, making mothers more vulnerable to sickness — and thus to losing their babies.

“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” Gomez said.

Reproductive failure is just one of the serious health impacts the dolphins continue to face a full 12 years since the oil spill. Yet the money set aside for the disaster — a record $18.5 billion,  including a $5.5 billion Clean Water Act violation fine — has led to unprecedented new tools and investment in science.

Long-term, focused research meant that scientists like Gomez were able to define the conditions of a normal dolphin pregnancy. After more than a decade of refinement, her full-body ultrasound scans now take only 10 minutes. 

Researchers hope to apply this expertise to other marine mammal species; reproduction is important for understanding population growth and decline. Such knowledge can inform conservation decisions or planning for crises, Gomez said.

“​There is no doubt that Deepwater Horizon expedited a lot of these techniques,” Gomez said.

All this new science could help us respond to threats yet to come, from declining water quality to worsening red tides, researchers say. Since dolphins will likely experience the negative effects of polluted water first, what happens to them might happen to humans down the road.

“Dolphins are sentinels of ecosystem health,” said Randy Wells, director of the Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, who has studied dolphins for more than 50 years.

The question is whether humanity will keep investing.

Gauging the Damage

Bottlenose dolphins are just one of the more than 30 different dolphin species around the world.  They can grow up to 13 feet, or about as long as a Volkswagen Beetle. In populations that have been studied long-term, females have been known to live up to 67 years, and males up to 52 years, Wells said. 

They demonstrate high levels of intelligence and problem-solving. Bottlenose dolphins also have complex social interactions, and many live in resident communities, interacting with the same individuals over the course of their lives. Even facing oil spills, hurricanes, or other threats to their environments, they tend to stay in their same home ranges.

Len Thomas once joined the team studying these dolphins in Barataria Bay. But after a “pissed-off stingray” sent the ecological statistician from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews speeding back to dry land with a barb sticking out of his foot, he decided to crunch dolphin data from the safety of Zoom calls.

Baseline data on dolphin populations was scant before the spill, leaving researchers with little to analyze. But in its aftermath, scientists had to quantify the oil’s impact so the government could determine how much funding and restoration was necessary.

It was a complicated process. A simple death count would have underestimated the damage, as it wouldn’t account for future generations that would have been born if there hadn’t been a spill, said researcher Ryan Takeshita, who worked on the damage assessment.

“We didn’t just want to think about the dead dolphins,” said Takeshita, who now serves as deputy director of conservation medicine at the National Marine Mammal Foundation.

And while statistician Thomas predicted that it would take about 35 years for the dolphins to recover to 95% of their original population, he wanted more clarity on the spill’s impact.

Using data collected from the health assessments, Thomas came up with a population measurement that offers a more accurate picture of dolphin recovery: lost cetacean years. 

“Across all individuals that could have been there, it’s the difference in the number of years they did experience from the number of years they could have experienced,” Thomas explained.

The final number from his model: in addition to its more obvious damage, the spill eliminated  31,000 cetacean years.

“We now have something that can apply to basically any cetacean species,” he said. “The modeling framework is there.”

Going forward, Thomas hopes to see more baseline data collected so that marine mammal scientists can reference it if another disaster happens.

Beat of the Bottlenose

Once scientists are in the water with bottlenoses, “it’s really like a well-organized circus,” said Barb Linnehan, deputy director of animal health and welfare for the National Marine Mammal Foundation. The team works simultaneously to collect their data and let dolphins go as quickly as possible.

For Linnehan, a cardiac vet, this meant honing new techniques for listening to dolphins’ pulsing heartbeats. Prior to oil spill investigations, wild dolphins’ hearts had never been studied. There were no agreed-upon standards for monitoring the hearts.

“That foundation just hadn’t been laid yet,” Linnehan said.

After months of practice, Linnehan’s team hammered out a five-minute method. Vets reached between a dolphin’s front fins and tilted it onto its side to get the best angle. Then, they used an extra-long waterproof stethoscope to listen to the dolphin’s heartbeat, or grabbed an ultrasound wand connected to a floating yellow ECG machine to take internal pictures.

The team’s research revealed that Barataria Bay dolphin hearts are unusual. Compared with those of healthy wild dolphins in Sarasota Bay, the walls of their ventricles — the part of the heart that pumps blood to the rest of the body — were thinner than normal, which may be linked to oil pollution, Linnehan said.

Perfecting the techniques and applying them to other populations, Linnehan’s team found another surprising fact: a majority of the dolphins studied had harmless heart murmurs. 

Dolphins have big, muscular hearts that pump blood extremely fast. Sometimes, this causes an extra sound, or murmur, in their heartbeat, a phenomenon also seen in other athletic mammals like sled dogs, race horses and even human marathon runners. 

Knowing these murmurs are normal is important to both traditional dolphin vets and those studying future marine crises because it may help them prioritize more serious concerns, Linnehan said. 

In retrospect, Linnehan said, scientists should have been studying wild dolphins’ hearts all along.

“It’s unfortunate that it takes huge environmental disasters like that to get people to actually notice and care,” she said. “But then we have to capitalize on that momentum.”

Swimming into Uncertainty

The benefits of many of these innovations are already clear.

For one, Thomas’ models are already being used to measure potential effects from the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, a project meant to restore erosion the oil spill caused. Some scientists think it will ultimately decrease the salinity, or saltiness, of the water.

Thomas predicts this low salinity will be “absolutely catastrophic” for the dolphins in Barataria Bay.

“This makes Deepwater Horizon seem like a walk in the park,” Thomas said. “It’s going to effectively destroy the population if it carries on year after year.”

While the initial restoration funding from Deepwater Horizon has been depleted, researchers stress the importance of investing in such science so research like this can continue.

Beyond following-up on the post-spill health of dolphins, scientists like Gomez hope to pursue other crucial projects, like ramping up rehabilitation and rescue efforts for stranded animals. 

“The funding was so impactful, but the story isn’t over,” Gomez said.

According to Wells, Florida is lucky it hasn’t experienced devastating oil spill impacts comparable to Louisiana given the sheer amount of drilling on the Gulf coast.

“Trusting that nothing is going to go wrong is a fool’s errand,” Wells said.

Climate change presents another water quality threat, as pathogens survive longer in hotter water. Nutrients from agriculture, septic tanks and sewage infrastructure not designed to handle Florida’s fast-growing population continue to exacerbate red tides, killing dolphins and the prey they depend on. Long-lasting pollutants and trash crowd waterways.

“​​Where controls are not in place to control the pollution that’s going into the water, it has pushed ecosystems beyond the tipping point,” Wells said. “We need to give ecosystems a chance to bounce back.”

While dolphins will likely be on the front lines of these threats, Wells said, humans could feel some of the same effects. Dolphins and humans have common interests: we are mammals that depend on clean water for life.

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Florida’s estuaries once teemed with clams, oysters and other bivalves that helped keep waters clean and seagrasses healthy. By the mid-20th century, only a fraction of the state’s vast shellfish beds and reefs remained. Now, citizens, fishers and scientists are working across the coasts to restore nature’s best pollution filters. Can a small clam make a big difference in serious water pollution hotspots like the Indian River Lagoon?

Blair Wiggins bought his first outboard motor at the age of 10. Small as a weed-wacker engine, it powered his 12-foot Jon boat. He bought the motor for $55 with money he earned mowing his neighbor’s yard. 

When he toted around his dad’s five-weight fly rod, the grown-ups told him he “ain’t gonna catch nothing.” And yet, Wiggins returned from the bays and estuaries near his home with bucketsful of sea trout. 

“Where’d you catch all them fish?” they’d ask. “I can’t catch them with a fly rod,” he replied. “Bye.”

Wiggins was a fishing guide for a dozen years, poling his flats boat and pointing out flopping trout, redfish and mullet. Then for 23 years, he starred in a TV show called “Addictive Fishing,” produced by childhood friend Kevin McCabe. Wiggins first screen-tested the show in his son’s kindergarten class. The jabbering children hushed to watch. 

“From age seven to 70, we had an audience,” Wiggins said, and he still does. His show evolved into “Blair Wiggins Outdoors,” streamed on Bally Sports Sun and YouTube. Kids still scramble up to him and elders doggedly hobble over for photos.

When he hooks a fish on TV, Wiggins famously hollers, “There he is!” He calls prize catches “mogans,” mixing the Southern nickname “biggans” and the Northern vernacular, “monsters.” 

Over the decades, the mogans became harder to find. As Wiggins hauled fish out of the Indian River Lagoon, he observed the coastal ecosystem changing. First came the vanishing critters. As a kid, Wiggins recalled, he encountered millions of fragile starfish dotting Parris Island channels. “I haven’t seen one in 30 years,” he said.

The same holds true for seagrass, shellfish, horseshoe crabs, sea trout and mullet. Wading near the South Banyan Isles and Pineda, scraggly seagrass scratched his little-boy legs like prairie grass, and fanned out just as far. Brevard County was known as the sea trout capital of the world, Wiggins said. “You could go out off of any given dock, any bank, throw out a shrimp on a popping cork and catch a trout anywhere in Brevard County.”

When the seagrasses first disappeared, it was a little easier to fish—the trout were stark in the waters. Today, it’s tough to find them at all, he said.

In the past, hundreds of mullet would leap out of the water in a five-minute span. The splashes are now silent.

Nearly a half a century after he bought that tiny outboard, and more than two decades after he became a TV fishing star, Wiggins is moving into his third act. Rather than extracting marine life from his childhood waters, he is putting it back. He and fellow citizens along the Indian River coast are planting millions of hard clams, part of burgeoning initiatives across Florida to reintroduce historic shellfish to clean up waterways and restore life up the food chain. 

Oysters and hard clams, cradled in their self-built shells, clean water as they develop. Clams gobble algae through a siphon and expel feces, a fertilizer for seagrass and food for shrimp. Once they’re settled on the bottom, they clasp sea grass, rooting it into the soil. Each clam filters 20 gallons of water a day. Reintroducing shellfish to waterways is a natural solution, a return.

Death by 1,000 cuts

Quahog clams once thrived throughout Florida’s coastlines. Native American mounds along the Spruce Creek reveal an abundance of oysters and clams, along with saltwater fish. But by the 21^st century, the populations were devastated. Todd Osborne, a researcher at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, calls it death by 1,000 cuts.

As the four-mile Pineda Causeway was built in 1973, carving into the Indian River and Banana River lagoons, Blair Wiggins and his father chugged along south across from Patrick Air Force Base. The pair glared at the hulk of concrete. “Take a good look around son,” his father said. “Because there’s the beginning of the end.” 

“He was right,” said Cari Wiggins, Blair’s wife and the director of “Blair Wiggins Outdoors.”

The Pineda Causeway was one of 13 causeways constructed across the Indian River Lagoon. Around the state, the raised roads choke water flow by creating a narrow opening. The bottleneck impedes water exchange and marine life migration. Pockets of decaying matter gather in its corners, fueling algal blooms. Blair calls them: “dams with roads on top.”

“They funneled into a small opening and everything quit moving,” Cari Wiggins said. “Water is not going to want to flow sideways.”

The collapse of clams can also be traced to the commercial shellfish industry. At its peak in the 1980s and ‘90s, semi-trucks idled at boat ramps to pick up croker bags of native clams. 

The intense harvesting was the “nail in the coffin” for wild clam populations, Osborne said. He estimates harvesting data only cover a third of actual numbers because cash was involved.

Osborne said at the peak, the wild clam harvest was like the Wild West; clammers collected the shelled critters in the thousands. Unload. Get paid. Do it again.

“The clam boats that you saw, you could have lined them up side by side and walked to Merritt Island,” Cari Wiggins said.

Hard clams burrow in seagrass. As the clammers dragged spiked clam rakes along the bottom, they inadvertently dredged up seagrass and crushed the smallest clams and horseshoe crabs.

“Every morning I would get up and go to the boat ramp, literally it was a sea of grass floating on top of the water from where they had been digging with their rakes,” Blair said.

Pollution is another part of the complexity of harm. It flows from industries and local backyards into the water. Synthetic fertilizers and septic tanks are two of the culprits. 

“We’ve engineered a really beautiful and safe human landscape.” Osborne said. “We’ve also engineered a very efficient way of poisoning the lagoon with excessive nutrients.” 

While shellfish filter the water, larval clams are especially sensitive to pollution and cannot ingest it, said Mike Sullivan, who owns a St. Augustine shellfish farm and seafood market/restaurant called Commander’s Shellfish Camp.

Clams, Sullivan said, are like canaries in coal mines for the sea.

“Clams die if the water quality is bad or is getting bad. They can’t survive,” he said. “That’s why they’re not repopulating in a lot of these areas that have been fished out.”

Sullivan is the largest clam producer on the east coast of Florida, with about 75% of the region’s “clam leases” that the state administers for inshore coastal waters, according to the marine scientist Mark Martindale, director of the Whitney Laboratory.

Coastal water pollution has reached the point in Florida that not many waterways remain safe enough to grow hard clams for people to eat. Along the Northeast Florida coast, Sullivan’s spot on the Matanzas River is one of the few.

A meeting of the minds between scientists and locals who’ve fished the waters longer than it takes to earn a PhD led to a promising solution for what ails the Indian River Lagoon. Restore the shellfish even if people can’t eat them. Reintroduce thousands and millions.

Restoring the once plentiful shellfish, Osborne and Wiggins conclude, would represent a major step toward renewing clean water.

A bottom-up approach to clean water

The Indian River Lagoon Clam Restoration Initiative began as a grassroots movement. 

“We had an idea, and a network of people that came together to say, OK, let’s just do it, and see what happens.’ And we got attention, and it was working,” Osborne said. “And then the money came, so it has definitely been a bottom-up approach.”

Partners including the St. Johns River Water Management District and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) provide staff, scientific oversight, boats and permitting. In 2019, EPA’s National Estuary Program awarded additional support. Every 10 cents puts another clam in the water, Osborne said. But what’s crucial about the project, he said, is that the public is the main stakeholder.

“It’s more important that the people that live here and experience this every day, are front and center,” Osborne said. “Because you don’t need someone from Tallahassee telling you what to do over here.”

Living on the river is much more motivating than a remote vision, he explained.

Beginning in 2019, scientists collected hard clams from Mosquito Lagoon. Osborne describes them as “super clams,” because they had survived both brown tide and toxic algae bloom crises. 

“They are adapted to this ecosystem as it is now,” Osborne said.

At the Whitney Lab’s bivalve hatchery in St. Augustine, scientists began spawning the clams and raising them in a nursery that spring. After nine months, when the clams were about the size of golf balls, scientists and volunteers released them into the Mosquito and Indian River lagoons. 

The clams are grown on licensed shellfish aquaculture leases; Blair is among those who offer lease space. Nets shield the clams from predators like stingrays, though Florida crown conchs that also love to eat them occasionally drill through. The conchs can devour 20 percent of the clams on a bed.

Cedar Key’s model, “Clamelot”

Across Florida on the rural Gulf of Mexico Nature Coast, a gravestone stands outside city hall in the tiny fishing village of Cedar Key. Etched in gray are the words: “In loving memory dedicated to the commercial net fishermen of this community.” The gravestone was erected on July 1, 1995, the summer after Florida’s voters banned gill-net fishing by constitutional amendment. The vote followed a major push by sport fishers to stop commercial netting they said was harming fish populations, though researchers later found that the campaign had been misrepresented. The few fishing villages left in Florida, including Cedar Key, seemed doomed to lose a way of life.

Instead, a rebound emerged. Federally funded job retraining converted net fishers and others put out of work by the ban to become clam farmers. Leslie Sturmer, a shellfish extension specialist, relocated to Cedar Key to assist. Locals accepted the practice, she said, as the technology is simple, maintenance is low and the relatively clean coastal waters are perfect for clams.

Cedar Key launched the first clam aquaculture leases on Florida’s Gulf coast. The legacy began. Now, the town, located about 60 miles west of Gainesville, provides some 90% to 95% of Florida’s eating clams. The clams are cultured in water-side clam shacks and planted on the lease sites around the Cedar Key coast. The booming industry, which Sturmer calls “Clamelot” after the legendary Camelot, provides a local incentive for keeping water clean. 

The clams in the Indian River Lagoon, on the other hand, aren’t edible. The water quality is too poor, Blair said, and the pollution pulses through these filter feeders. 

“Eventually down the line, I would love to be able to go out there and harvest a five-gallon bucket of clams, come back and then have a great clam bake at the house like I used to,” Blair said, “but until it gets right and we get our clams and our water back, the farm-raised clams are good enough for me.”

Seeding hope in seeding clams

This spring, wading outside the River Rocks Restaurant in Rockledge, volunteers poured 100,000 hard clams from red-ribbed bags into the Indian River Lagoon. 

The shards collected across the sand, crunching beneath feet. “This is how the Indian River Lagoon used to feel,” Blair said. 

The River Rocks spot is among hundreds carefully chosen in the region. When people go out for lunch there, they can see the restoration project’s placard and poles in the water or spot volunteers slugging around bags of clams.

“We wanted to engage the public so that they could see what we were doing,” Osborne said.

The area was a former productive aquaculture lease, with clam shell remnants speckling the shoreline. The scientists replant clams where they once lived. 

Across the state in southwest Florida, Sarasota Bay Watch follows a similar strategy. The nonprofit began releasing scallops into the bay in 2009. However, the sensitive scallops couldn’t survive the poor water quality. In 2016, the group shifted to clams. The southern quahogs are heartier, said Ronda Ryan, Sarasota Bay Watch executive director. They survived Florida’s devastating 2017-2018 red tide.

The nonprofit also releases clams where seagrass is sparse in the bay. “The hope is that putting clams in the water will help clear the water and improve the capability for photosynthesis and thus increase seagrass,” Ryan said.

Osborne agrees.

“The goal here is to is to reestablish seagrass because seagrass is the functional base or foundation of the ecosystem,” he said. “Everything out there either eats it, lays their eggs in it, hides in it or lives in it. Without it, it’s like a desert.”

A greater purpose

In 2019 when the Indian River Lagoon Restoration Project began, water samples didn’t detect any clam larvae. But in this spring’s spawning season, Osborne said, hundreds of free-swimming clam larvae — known as veligers — showed up in the samples.

“We know that at least what we put out there has spawned,” Osborne said.

The project has released 13 million clams since its inception, with nearly a million in this year alone. By October, the volunteers and scientists will plant three million more. The next phase, which the FWC is sponsoring, will add 12 million clams to the lagoon’s troubled waters in the next two years. 

Osborne paints a vision for the future he and other scientists and volunteers are working to create: Once the quahogs clear out the algae, water clarity will improve and sunlight will reach the darkened, dying sea grasses. 

Pinfish, a prominent bait fish, nibble off of clam siphons, unclogging them. 

Clams are the base, Sullivan said, and with their flourishing, others along the ecological chain will, too.

On a recent Friday, three generations of women converged in the shallow water near River Rocks restaurant: a grandmother, Annette Bushnell, 57; her daughter, Cami Waldon, 36; and a granddaughter, Kaylee Waldon, 14. Annette and Cami donned straw hats and giggled as they hauled the quahogs. 

 “We’ve heard rumors that the Indian River Lagoon was once clear, and we’d love to try to make that happen again,” Cami said. “I like releasing the clams, knowing that they were going to serve a greater purpose.”

Bushnell said she appreciated working arm and arm with the community, passing the bags between one another. Her father lived on a houseboat, and her grandmother owned a boat named “Tattletail.” In Washington state, the family clammed with her grandparents.

Brine pulses through Blair’s veins too. A sea breeze saturates his lungs.

His family’s fishing legacy traces back five generations, he said; on his dad’s side, back to his great-great grandad in southern Alabama, and on his mom’s side, back to the Seminole Indians of Florida.

The solution to Florida’s water woes can’t be just about the shellfish, he acknowledges. For all the work he, his neighbors and the scientists are doing to restore clams, an even greater effort must be made to stem the pollution torrent killing the lagoon. 

He and other locals can wade in Florida waters and chuck clams out — an action.

Born and raised on the Indian River and its lagoon, Blair said for him, it is now dead. He aims to revive it.

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 cleaned up the sewage pollution that once fouled waters from Biscayne Bay to Escambia Bay and across the nation. But extreme rains and more-severe hurricanes brought on by climate change, along with aging infrastructure, have sent hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage into Florida’s waters and communities. 

Since the turn of the 21 century, more than 2.4 billion gallons of wastewater spewed across Florida, according to state records.

Sewage spills seeped across land and gushed into rivers, lakes and coastlines. As sewage infrastructure ages, broken and failing equipment coupled with the worsening weather wrought by climate change can harm the environment and people exposed.

Passed half a century ago, the Clean Water Act made a world of difference in cleaning up sewage filth across the nation. Municipalities could no longer dump waste into bays and other waters. But sewage plants and pipes built in the wake of the law are wearing. Florida’s population is booming. And the extreme rains, stronger storms and rising seas associated with climate change compound stress on the systems.

WUFT obtained data spanning more than 20 years on wastewater pollution reported to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

As the gallons of spills were tallied for counties across the state, central Florida emerged at the epicenter of the crisis

The spills ranged from treated to untreated wastewater. Untreated and partially treated sewage are the most harmful. Reclaimed water is wastewater cleaned for reuse purposes, such as agriculture and irrigation.

Untreated or partially treated spills contain raw sewage that carries bacteria, viruses and parasites, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They may cause diseases ranging from mild stomach problems to life-threatening ailments like cholera.

Meanwhile, spills that enter waterways harm more than water quality and aquatic animals. When the water cannot be used for drinking; shellfish harvesting; or fishing or recreation, the losses reverberate through the economy.

While overflows occur in almost every sewer system, when they happen frequently, it means something is wrong, according to the EPA.

In Florida, the top causes reported for wastewater spills were systems inundated from rain and broken or failing equipment.

A century ago, sewage boats plied Florida’s waters to dump barrelsful of waste into the open sea. Some of the records for modern spills evoke that history.

In 2017, a caller reported and photographed raw sewage and toilet paper in a canal in Edgewater leading to the Intracoastal Waterway. Manatee sightings were replaced by the soiled tissues and human excrement.

The caller revealed that a sailboat owner was dumping the waste—almost a century since the days of the “Pocahontas” sewer boat.

Click the graphic below to explore WUFT’s interactive map of wastewater spills impacting Florida waterways.

The data indicated sewage spills caused fish kills in multiple waterways, ranging from Biscayne Bay to along the Intracoastal Waterway.

In the Florida Keys, dead fish, crab and lobsters were reported in a canal in 2018 — accompanied by a strong sewage odor.

“The water in the canal is brown,” the report stated.

Manatee River topped the chart for the most wastewater pollution reported over the years. The 36-mile-long river flows from Manatee County into the Gulf of Mexico and is home to wildlife that includes manatees, dolphins and alligators. 

Others flock to the river for recreation, paddling kayaks and casting fishing lines along the tea-colored water.

The river is a cradle for threatened species like the wood stork. The bald-headed, three-foot tall bird is an indicator species, which serve as “excellent messengers of the past, present and future,” according to the National Park Service.

On a small island where the Manatee and Brandon rivers meet, the only wood stork colony in Manatee County finds refuge. The colony relies on the shallow marshes and puddles to catch fish, according to the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast.

Climate change further threatens Florida’s crumbling sewage systems, with worsening heavy rains, storms and flooding. Historically, monthly totals for both spill volume and rainfall over the past two decades correlated strongly.

With climate change, one of the main threats to Florida is more occurrences of heavy rain, said state climatologist David Zierden.

Warmer air leads to more evaporation — and more precipitation. Heavy rains worsen the risk of flooding, which can strain aging infrastructure.

Annual rainfall has increased over the past three decades in the eastern U.S., Zierden said. In addition, Florida is seeing an increasing number of days with more than 3 inches of rain, he said, an extreme amount that can lead to flooding.

As hurricane season kicked off in Miami, the beginning of June brought heavy rainfall that caused sewer overflows and a no-swim advisory, according to the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department.

“It’s going to take a massive infrastructure overhaul to address it, especially if sea level rise accelerates as predicted,” Zierden said. “We’ve got a lot of catch up to do before we make it better.”

Meanwhile, the reported sewage spills concentrate in densely populated areas, which can impact a greater number of residents when the system fails. 

Hundreds of people were left without drinking water in Sumter County in 2015 when multiple wastewater lines broke, according to the data. Other reports indicated raw sewage flowed through the homes and garages of Florida residents.

Florida’s population is projected to grow by more than 12 million people over the next half century, according to data from the Bureau of Economic and Business Research, projected out by the Florida Department of Transportation.

Among the state’s counties on track to gain the most people were ones already facing the biggest sewage spill crises.

In 2020, Florida took a historic step to protect water quality, said Alexandra Kuchta, press secretary for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

The implementation of the Florida’s Clean Waterways Act approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis is working to address the issue of aging infrastructure across the state, Kuchta said.

For the first time ever, she said the legislation requires power outage plans that aim to minimize untreated spills from all sewage disposal facilities. Septic tanks are now regulated as a source of nutrients. Fertilizer use must be documented to ensure compliance with Best Management Practices and to aid in evaluation of their effectiveness. The legislation also updated stormwater rules and design criteria to improve performance of the systems statewide and address nutrients.

Sewage disposal plants must now turn over financial records to DEP to prove funds are being allocated to infrastructure upgrades, repairs and maintenance to prevent systems from falling into states of disrepair, Kuchta said.

Additional legislation upped the fines for environmental crimes to hold polluters accountable, she said, which increased sanitary sewer overflow fines by 100% and all other environmental fines by 50%.

But the efforts leave the worsening root of the sewage crisis unaddressed. To slow the worst effects of climate change, Zierden said greenhouse gas emissions must be greatly cut.

“Our current governor and his latest budget has seemed to do a lot on the adaptation side, but we’re still hearing crickets on the mitigation side — actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions,” Zierden said. “We have to do both.”

Because a certain amount of climate change is locked in and will continue, adaptation is key, he said.

“But that’s only one piece of the puzzle,” Zierden said.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, which allocated an expected $19.1 billion to Florida with projects that include protection against extreme weather events. The plan also outlines mitigation efforts with funds to expand public transportation and electric vehicle chargers to address the climate crisis.

WUFT compiled a searchable table below for readers to locate spill information for their county and local waterways.

In the event of a discharge, Kuchta said DEP responds with a three-pronged approach:

DEP also works with local health agencies to ensure that appropriate public health warnings are issued immediately. Kutcha said DEP’s primary compliance efforts are to prevent spills by ensuring facilities are properly constructed, operated and maintained.

About the project and reporting:

In 2000, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection began maintaining this formatted data on all unauthorized wastewater discharges reported in Florida.

WUFT filed a public records request for the data spanning more than two decades. The data arrived in multiple spreadsheets with errors and inconsistent reporting methods over the years.

While the data mistakenly included paint spills, other times it left fields blank for wastewater spills that amounted to millions of gallons.

This project was an effort to reveal the dirty water hidden among poor data.

For more detailed information on the spills, check the searchable table descriptions.

Contact Alexandra Harris at harrisalexmarie@gmail.com to provide updated information on any of the spills included in this project.

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50^th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. 

Hundreds of Florida waters are considered “impaired” for fish consumption. As a result the Florida Department of Health advises that most fish caught in the state’s waters shouldn’t be eaten more than twice a week. But that message does not always get through to subsistence fishers.

Marlie Pasilan and her husband settle on the Fort De Soto Gulf Pier as early as 9 a.m. to feed their three children. Her family eats fish like French fries. A hearty wind hits their faces, as ruffled palm leaves clap behind them. Fleeting seagulls steady themselves along the pier’s canopies and atop light poles. Dozens of visitors in fedoras and flip flops stroll in and out of the outstretched walkway, easy targets for the stream of bird waste above.

Along the ledge of the pier, anglers lean up against the railing with stiff 8-foot poles, too taut to budge in the brisk wind. Some fish for sport. Others for sustenance. The Pasilan family are subsistence anglers, who typically fish from Boca Ciega Bay and keep whatever they catch. 

“As long as there is meat, we will eat it,” Marlie says. 

Subsistence fishing doesn’t just feed the body, it feeds the soul. But the saltwater sustenance also presents an unseen risk. 

Boca Ciega is among 17 spots in the Tampa Bay watershed considered “impaired” for fish consumption, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Across the state, the Florida Department of Health puts out advisories for how much fish is safe to eat; the agency advises that most fish should be eaten no more than twice a week. But the message does not always get through to subsistence fishers and their families. For the Pasilans, as for other anglers who fish Florida’s waters, it is a nutritional, social and cultural tradition from home — in their case, the fish-filled islands of the Philippines. 

She casts one line after the other, reeling them in minutes later to see the squid bait still pierced to the hook. She doesn’t fish freshwater; the catch is bland there, she says. Coasting nearby, a pelican flutters its webbed feet and lurks around her line for lunch. Within seconds, it dunks its beak, then body, into the bay with a single splash in pursuit of the limited prey. Marlie pulls her line in once more: nothing. Whether it was the pelican or a larger fish that snagged her bait, Marlie doesn’t know. Standing about 10 feet away, her husband, Joebert, holds a steady grip. As the tip of his fishing pole takes a sharp nod to the sea, he yanks at the reel, winding his arm clockwise, one spool after the other. A pinfish launches out of the water, propelled by its recoil, and comes to a shaky stop hovering above the pale-cement pier. Joebert reels in another. And then another.

The eight-inch fish was all the Pasilan family could catch that day. Pinfish, striped blue and gold, have a signature dark spot behind their gills, small, sharp teeth and spiked fins. Usually chopped up as bait by neighboring anglers, the family toss every catch into their cooler. 

Fresh and saltwater fish are among the largest wild food sources available, yet urban fishing remains underreported, according to an Eckerd College survey. Piers, bridges, seawalls and public parks are important commons for urban fishers, survey authors Noelle Boucquey and Jessie Fly found, and help keep food on the table for many families. Eleven percent of survey respondents reported that fishing kept them from going hungry in the previous year.

Yet anglers often lack access to consumption-risk information. The pier that Marlie and Joebert fish from lacks advisory signs warning fishers of possible mercury contamination. About 77% of Tampa Bay anglers keep the fish they catch, Boucquey and Fly found, and of those, 97% eat the fish. 

They don’t hope, they pray

The expert anglers didn’t come that Sunday. They could sense few fish inhabiting the waters, Marlie says. The cool temperature makes the spring Tampa Bay heat bearable for regulars and tourists alike, but chills the water that mackerel, blue runner and ladyfish love. Clear, crystallized waters turn to disturbed, broken waves. The fish dislike the winds, Marlie says. They prefer sticky and stale air. Still, even when the fish were less likely to bite, Marlie and her husband wheeled their wagon to the piers—as often as they could—hoping to prepare a fish dinner.

No one taught Marlie how to fish. She lived in Negros Occidental, a Philippine province in which cities dot the coastline and many people rely on fishing for their livelihood. Frolicking on the edge of the Sulu Sea, she and her friends used to dive into the water with nets, spears or sometimes their bare hands to try and capture a fleshy morsel. Her parents — her mother a teacher and her father a police officer — were often not home, so her sister would cook as she studied. Her sister poured tomatoes, scallions, onions, ginger, garlic and fish into a boiling vinegar and water broth and flavored the stew with salt and pepper. Her husband makes a similar recipe that, to this day, she devours.  

A majority of her university classmates moved immediately to the U.S. upon graduation, but Marlie resisted. 

“You work like a donkey here,” she says with a laugh.

After trying for a decade to make a living in the Philippines and in Dubai as a nurse, she needed additional money to support her growing family and migrated to Maine in 2016. She moved to Pinellas Park, a city near St. Petersburg, two years later to escape the slow pace and cold weather. 

As a traveling nurse currently stationed at Brooksville’s Oak Hill Hospital, Marlie works at least three 12-hour shifts a week, two of which are overnight, fulfilling medications and doctor’s orders. With low staffing levels, she labored in the psychiatric unit in late March and early April. Nurses walked the corridor with bruises along their arm from aggressive patients who bit, grabbed and slapped. All three days she brought to work a sliver of fresh-caught blue runner and waited for the lunchroom to clear before the fragrant odor wafted through the air.

“When I eat my fish, I have to hide,” she says.

 Her colleagues had previously gawked and complained not only about the smell but the fish eye that stared back at them as they glanced at her plate. She returned with a tease. Eating fish eyes sharpens your eyesight. 

Back at the pier, one desperate pinfish pounds the walls of the cooler every 30 seconds, flapping on the backs of its brethren. They will not bite you, Marlie says. At least 15 pinfish lay flat in the bare icebox, their beady eyes fixated above. Some gutted, others gasped for oxygen. Steel cleaning boards, equipped with faucets, create checkpoints along the pier for fishers to slit the bellies and spoon out the insides of their catches.

Within the next 12 hours, if their fate wasn’t frozen or fried, the fish were balled and plopped into wonton soup, stewed with onions, tomatoes and moringa leaves or dried into a crispy chip. The family’s catches range from sardines to Spanish mackerel, a gold-speckled fish that hangs around reefs and grass beds. The Department of Health advises that the consumption of just two pinfish in a given week could heighten mercury contamination risk for women of childbearing age and children, present in most Florida seafood. 

Generally, though, the fish to worry about are larger species such as king mackerel, also found near piers and high in mercury, says Ted Lange, a wildlife biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

“It’s generally not big, predatory fish, so that’s good,” Lange says about subsistence angler catches. 

Lange advises anglers to catch a variety of fish from different locations. He adds that the state health department’s 83-page fish advisory report, “Your Guide To Eating Fish Caught in Florida,”  provides an influx of information and is not user-friendly. The advisory aims to alert anglers about the potential for contaminated fish within Florida waterways.

“This is the most horrible document on the face of the planet,” Lange says. “We’re trying to overcome this, and it’s very challenging.”

 When anglers purchase their fishing license, they receive a page on freshwater fishing regulations, Lange says. The Department of Health also provides wallet card print outs online with condensed fish consumption guidelines.

“I don’t think this is fairly straightforward, but we always strive to do better,” he says.

Marlie is unfamiliar with most consumption guidelines; her husband relies on instinct. 

“It comes from the water and the sea, it’s safe,” she says.

She thrusts her line again, a sorrowful eight feet from the railing. Although she fishes alongside her husband, she mostly accompanies him for moral support. The line bobs again. A fish nibbled at her bait and darted away. 

“Come on, bite all of it,” she says. “If you bite, bite!”

She’s not good with fish names but keeps any catch that is not too small or bony. Her family doesn’t just hope for ample fish in Tampa Bay. They pray.

A Coastal Love Story

Like a sinkhole, Florida pulls in regional and global sources of mercury. As the potent toxin accumulates in fishes, anglers who consume those with the highest levels face the threat of neurological diseases, brain impairments and related cancers, says University of Florida Fisheries and Aquatic Science professor Mike Allen. Consider a king mackerel that chows on sardines with tiny traces of mercury. Mercury builds up in their fat cells, magnified with every sardine the mackerel eats. The larger and older the fish, the more cautious children and women of childbearing age should be, Allen says. Spanish mackerel can also be high in mercury, but they’re smaller, shorter lived and not as dangerous as the large king mackerel.

“It’s not like if you ate mackerel three times a week you’re guaranteed to get sick,” he says, “but you have an increased probability and because of that, we put out the guidelines.”

Nearby coal-fired power plants have heightened mercury levels in the Tampa Bay region. Tampa Electric Co., which began introducing natural gas turbines in April, relied on coal-fired units for 50 years.  

About 80% of fish advisories are reactions to reports of mercury contamination. Razieh Farzad, a UF food science assistant professor, acknowledges that online advisories are not easily accessible for all anglers. But she’s unsure if additional awareness on contaminated fish and waterways will sway anglers who rely on the pier to feed their families. 

“Whether they’re going to accept our recommendation or not,”  Farzad says, “I think there’s still lots of work to be done.”With food representing culture and emotion as well as substance, Farzad realizes she cannot force anglers to change what they do and don’t eat. Scientists must listen and meet anglers where they are, she says, before suggesting alternatives.

The steaming plate of flaky fish in her Pinellas Park home resembles the home-cooked meals her sister prepared for her as a child. Supported by the pier’s ledge and hugging the fishing pole with her palms, she says Tampa Bay’s water reminds her of home. She met her husband on the sea. He drove a local passenger ship that connected her hometown to the country’s capital, Manila, where she started her nursing career. They met in her early 20s, and he was her fourth cousin on her mom’s side. Initially fraught with tension from her family, she hesitated to go home after work. But her love for him trumped the whispers and finger wags of disapproval.

“Before I was like, I don’t want to go home because people will talk about us,” Marlie says. “Later on, my brain matured. ‘Who cares? You’re not the one feeding us.’”

 As her marriage nears the 20-year checkpoint, their love of fish and coastal waters keeps their bond teeming at the brim.

The sweet and savory sound of Hiligaynon departs from Marlie’s lips and salsas into Joebert’s ear. Her husband doesn’t speak English and uses their native, serenade-like dialect to communicate. Its candied lullaby reflects their ever-present love. Even curse words sound sweet, she says. Joebert doesn’t work outside the home. He cooks and cares for their three kids: 18-year-old Jollianne, 11-year-old Jacob and 9-year-old Joellize. He floods his free time with “what to catch” and “where to fish” YouTube videos, and harvesting eggs from the pet chickens Marlie purchased from Ocala.

For women of childbearing age and children, the risk of mercury contamination is higher. In a Duval County study, only 15.7% of anglers were aware of the fish consumption guidelines, and nearly a third of women ate a high-risk fish such as golden snapper, king mackerel and Spanish mackerel within the last two months. All anglers are advised not to eat king mackerel of any size, and women of childbearing age and children can safely eat Spanish mackerel once a month. About three weeks later, Marlie and Joebert caught two. 

‘God will understand’

Her kids never tire of the saltwater delicacy.

Fried fish, coated in a crunchy, golden batter, rest on the kitchen counter. Beside it lies steaming Sinigang, a sour fish stew made with tamarind or guava powder. Each child snags a piece of the flaky, fried snack their parents leave on the counter with no explanation. At dinner time, Marlie dissects the day’s catch, separating the meat from the bone, and severing the fish’s head. She and her husband always eat the eyes. Her kids refuse. In fact, they can barely peel a banana, she says. At dinner’s end, the sound of pots and pans clashing in the kitchen sink echo throughout the house. Her husband resents cooking, and he wants the house to know. 

Joebert seems less concerned about the apparent mercury risk. He believes fish have naturally occurring mercury (they do, in fact) and fresh catches are healthier than greasy, fast-food meals. Seafood is a highly digestible protein that contains Omega-3 fatty acids that help prevent cardiovascular disease and strengthen brain development. As an adult male, he’s also the least vulnerable in his family of five. Despite the risk, she takes his lead.

On another Sunday, Marlie hastily preps a bowl of cereal for her children, hoping the sugary breakfast will hold them until she and Joebert return from the pier. She and he make a pit stop at McDonalds and head off to fish, missing church service. 

“God will understand,” she says. 

Raised Catholic, she remembers her grandmother counting a string of beads on a rosary for more than half an hour. Marlie says the prolonged prayers felt like a punishment and interfered with her short attention span. The two would rise before the sun for 4 a.m. Sunday service, reiterating the rosary prayer in dainty dresses and concluding the morning with baskets of fresh produce and sweets at the flea market. 

“If you think about it, God will throw away all the blessings at 4 a.m.,” her grandmother would say, “so who will be the first one to catch them?”

Marlie prefers to let her children decide on their faith.

Twenty minutes before 1 p.m., the tip of Joebert’s fishing line bends like a horse shoe. As he begins to reel it in, Marlie stretches out her fingertips to help release the fish. It’s a Spanish mackerel, an essential part of her family’s fish stew recipe. Spanish mackerel, one of the fish the health department advises women of childbearing age and children eat only once a month. She grabs a muddied teal rag and grips the mackerel with both hands. After tossing it in the cooler, she returns to her spot on the pier. Two splotches of fish blood speck her right cheek. Within hours, the maraschino red turns brown. Marlie pulls in a sardine. 

“This one is bigger; they don’t catch it,” Marlie says, referring to what other anglers keep. “They want the smaller ones, but for us we make use of everything.”

As the day creeps into the afternoon, heather gray dorsal fins rise from the watr swarming the pier. Some drive in trios, pairs and solo. 

“He peeked his head at us,” says a young girl as she grips the edge of the pier like handlebars. 

“That was a narwhal!” another girl squealed. 

They began to count down: 3, 2, 1, until they’d see another dolphin. 

They’re getting lazy, Marlie says, referring to the dolphins. They could have easily caught the fish on their own but instead lap around the pier, engulfing the mackerel dumb enough to fall for bait. 

Two Vietnamese women dominate the left end of the pier. As soon as their pole bobs, they know they made a catch that the dolphins crave. They turn from the ledge and dart to the opposite end, their fishing line above their heads. A man jolts the line from the water as the woman reaches the halfway point of the pier. 

A Spanish mackerel slaps the pavement. This time the Vietnamese angler won. Within minutes, she gets another bite and darts to the opposing end of the pier.

Local anglers erupt in a manufactured laugh. It happens again, only Marlie begins to reel in the line, her left arm immediately following her right like a game of tug of war. It is a game of tug of war. Guests watch as the outline of the dolphin maneuvers closer to the line. It snaps at the shimmering fish and flicks its tail in defiance. This time the dolphin won. With the hook still in its mouth, her line begins to recoil. At about 3 p.m., at least two 12-inch Spanish mackerel lay in the cooler. When she and Joebert arrive home, he plans to grill them. While the oceans may not be pristine, they cannot stay away. She’s already focused on the next time she and her husband will return to their beloved Fort De Soto pier to catch their next saltwater meal.

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Blooms and bureaucracy imperil the University of Florida’s landmark campus lake.

Every morning Kim Tanzer laces up her cross trainers, leaves her Golfview home and gravitates toward Lake Alice, her favorite water body a mere five minutes away. She has taken the same route for 30 years. The ritual soothes her.

She normally spots families of soft-shell turtles and American alligator hatchlings. Laurel oaks and palmetto bushes reflect on the surface like glass. 

But on a late spring day in 2021, her worries rose in tandem with the temperature. 

As Tanzer trekked the shores of the lake on the University of Florida campus, the 10 acres of open water appeared pea green. May had brought welcome sunlight and warmth, but also amplified the likelihood of algae infestation. Tanzer pitied the largemouth bass beneath the gunk; the great blue herons trying to hunt above it.

The sight Tanzer cherished as both a neighbor of the lake and a retired faculty member was more soiled than she’d ever seen it. Muck coated the top and turned Lake Alice opaque. 

The lake connects to Florida’s drinking water, too. To prevent the lake from flooding, two injection wells pipe water directly into the Floridan Aquifer, the region’s primary water source. 

Tanzer had to act. It is unlike her to sit idly by. She is more than just another morning jogger on the lake’s trails; she is a stakeholder in its future. Tanzer helped found Alice’s Friends, a defunct advocacy group that in the 1990s defeated a massive student housing complex at the water’s edge. 

The Friends beat that threat, but now the tainted water is somehow more disturbing. Generation after generation of advocates and scientists have worked to protect Lake Alice. The need for vigilance remains constant. No single administrative unit of the flagship university is tasked with caring for its signature water body. 

Tanzer paused her morning walk and sent a panicked email to Linda Dixon, the university’s director of Planning, Design and Construction: “Is anyone at UF watching Lake Alice?”

Dixon had no answer. Unsure, she connected Tanzer to Gail Hansen, chair of the university’s Lakes, Vegetation and Landscaping Committee and an associate professor in sustainable landscape design. Hansen had no answer, either.

The committee is “responsible for items that affect the use of the University lakes,” but has no power to test campus waters. Doing so requires a bureaucratic wrangle with little room for individual accountability. The last official testing of campus water bodies took place eight years ago — not recent enough to shed light on recent harmful blooms.

By summer, Hansen’s inbox filled with other concerned emails. Almost the entire lake was covered in algae. “I’ve been on campus for quite a while and I can tell you that it’s the worst that I’ve ever seen,” she says, “and it’s the most prolonged algae bloom that we’ve had.”

That June, Hansen says, she advised Matthew Williams, director of the university’s Office of Sustainability, to create a council to manage and monitor Lake Alice. More than a year later, Williams says his office is still deciding who the team ought to include.

“Campus lands are owned by the campus as a whole,” Williams says. “It’s no one particular department or unit that is responsible for them.” 

Despite UF’s considerable expertise, including its Water Institute with more than 300 faculty members devoted to freshwater challenges, no one oversees campus freshwaters. Campus conservation areas have their own, unique ecological standards and management goals, but no full-time staff dedicated to meeting them. 

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP’s) Division of State Lands owns Lake Alice and other natural areas across the state. The watershed is to be safeguarded as an educational resource. But historically, the state and its flagship university treated the lake as more of a dumping ground than a campus jewel.

From a place of respect, to the noose of a loop road

Lake Alice has drawn admirers since long before university students picnicked and hammocked on its shores. Before permits and paperwork, there were other means of preserving the land’s history.

The Alachua Tradition People, ancestors of the Potano Tribe, settled near what was a much smaller natural lake roughly 1,100 years ago for easy access to water. Another factor made the site sacred to the Tradition People: traces of life belonging to those before them, proof their ancestors once walked the same ground. 

They built a burial mound about 100 yards west of what is now the Levin College of Law. Inside were human remains, pieces of pottery and a hearth. Some of the artifacts dated to the Deptford Culture, a separate indigenous community that existed another 1,000 years before the mound.

“I think it was very common for people in the ancient past to use artifacts of their predecessors to write their own histories,” says UF archeology professor Kenneth Sassaman.

Life beside the lake became a way for communities to discover and preserve their indigenous culture; the proximity to water a means of honoring ancestors. Sassaman says Native Americans largely considered lakes and other bodies of water portals to the underworld. A lake’s depths, a place of respect. 

Modern Floridians transformed the lake for utilitarian purposes. Now that respect ebbs and flows. 

“If you treat the lake as manmade, if you consider it to be a manmade feature in the landscape, it seems to be warrant for doing whatever you want with it,” Sassaman says.

By the 19th century, farmers called the water Jonas’s Pond. Lore suggests a man, Jonas, walked across the fields in darkness one night. He might have listened to cicadas or crickets before the ground beneath him gasped open. A sinkhole formed in all its spontaneity; the portal swallowed Jonas and sent him down to the aquifer, belly of the state.

Local legend has it that a succeeding owner, Mr. Witt, used the depression as a dumping ground for agricultural waste. He claimed dominion over 10 quiet acres. He had a daughter, Alice. In 1892, a U.S. Geological Survey map named the water Lake Alice — presumably for the farmer’s daughter. 

The university cemented itself in Gainesville 13 years later. A likely wrinkled and retired Witt sold his pond and surrounding acreage to the state in 1925 for an agricultural experiment station. Instead, it became the university’s wildlife sanctuary.

The stated intent to safeguard the water and its wildlife went disregarded in just two decades. The sanctuary became a wastewater pit. Campus-wide sewage choked the lake from 1946 to 1947. Outraged residents pushed the administration to redirect the waste to a nearby sinkhole. The university complied.

Now, engineers eyed Lake Alice as the campus stormwater basin. To take on that much runoff, it had to be bigger. UF dammed the earth around Lake Alice in 1948 to expand its size. Water pooled and grew the lake’s surface area until 1959, when engineers installed the two injection wells to prevent overflow. Any water that risked flooding the surrounding campus would be funneled into the aquifer.

The next year, the sewage sinkhole was full. Treated sewage again flowed directly into Lake Alice. Even chlorine could not prevent the pollutants from skyrocketing.

Water hyacinths spanned the lake from shore to shore throughout the late 1960s. The invasive plants proliferated with all the extra nutrients. Alongside bouquets of lavender-blue, their clusters of leaves spread like cancer. They robbed the submerged native wildlife of oxygen. Specks of periwinkle dotted the sea of green in an almost apologetic fashion — the petaled beauty consolation for burying life below. 

Florida gar, black crappies, brown bullhead catfish and other wildlife suffocated under the vegetation. Their carcasses expelled nitrogen, already abundant in the lake from decades of sewage and agricultural waste. Additional nutrients attracted even more hyacinths. Hyacinths prompted even more fish kills. 

It became difficult to see Lake Alice for what it was: a sanctuary, a rare remnant of wild Florida. It had descended into entropy. 

By 1969, then-UF President Stephen O’Connell announced plans to drain the lake for a $1 million project: the Cross-Campus Highway, or Lake Alice Loop Road. The Florida Department of Transportation approved construction of four asphalt traffic lanes that would corral the lake. The road was expensive for the time, but boosters claimed it would pay for itself by increasing student enrollment.

Dredges and herbicides purged the hyacinths in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. The following year, O’Connell said Lake Alice had “very little ecology left.” Much of the native fish and plant life had perished, curbing the over 200 species of birds that relied on the watershed. Ten years before, more than 40% of Florida’s bird species had frequented Lake Alice. 

Losing the rest of the lake seemed inevitable to O’Connell. The expansion and prestige of the university took priority over dwindling campus wildlife. The UF community disagreed.

A new generation of conservationists including Marjorie Harris Carr, who would also help stop the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, set out to halt the rampant pollution, mass drainage and dams harming waters across the state and nation. Reporters covered the loop road controversy in The Florida Alligator from 1969 to 1972 with dogged persistence. Students and faculty organized and rallied. 

Over 80 advocates biked from Gainesville to Tallahassee in a November drizzle and chill to protest the state’s decision to build the highway. Though the road had already been approved, the state and university administration begrudgingly agreed to host a public hearing at UF’s J. Wayne Reitz Student Union on Jan. 12, 1972. 

That Wednesday, the Reitz auditorium overflowed with 360 people. Hundreds more waited outside. Advocates spoke out against the road. The university defended it. Law professor Joseph Little presented a 260-foot petition with 4,397 signatures against the construction. One week later, the university agreed to analyze alternative options, namely the expansion of mass transit. The Cross-Campus Highway was dead. 

Lake Alice was saved, but only for the time being.

Algae and bureaucracy, run amok

Green water is not unique to Lake Alice. 

Many Florida waters have naturally high levels of nutrients. Underlying sediments, like the thick layer of clay known as the Hawthorn Formation beneath Lake Alice, contain phosphorus that becomes part of a stream, river or lake. 

But human activities aggravate the problem. Fertilizers, sewage and storm runoff are the primary sources of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in state waters. 

The Clean Water Act went into effect on Oct. 18, 1972, nine months after the public hearing that saved Lake Alice from a permanent noose of traffic. Government would now constitute healthy water. To determine how standards should be met and enforced, different water bodies needed different designations. 

The new rules brought about widespread improvement in water quality. They also brought widespread confusion.

A symbol of water-quality rules that can be at once absurdly bureaucratic and inadequate to keep water clean, Lake Alice is considered a conservation area—and is permitted by the St. Johns Water Management District as a stormwater pond. There are no water-quality or nutrient standards required of such retention ponds. Sewage continued to drain into the lake into the ‘90s.

The university obtained a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Phase II permit in 2003 to study the effects of stormwater runoff on municipalities. The program regulates institutions or companies that directly release pollutants into water bodies, with Phase II focused on educational outreach and watershed planning. 

In the following decade, DEP designated the lake what is known as a “Class III water,” which requires it be healthy enough to support wildlife, including fish safe enough to eat. The university has violated that standard in two areas — for fecal coliform and E. Coli bacteria, and for exceeding phosphorus limits and keeping insufficient biological data.

Rather than rising to meet DEP’s standards, the university modified its Campus Master Plan in 2015 to “strive to meet” them. Still, UF is not required to do so — and Lake Alice remains on DEP’s Impaired Waters list.

Mark Clark, an associate professor of wetland ecology, led water quality testing and outreach efforts for the university until 2014. Clark monitored nutrient levels in Lake Alice and other campus waters. He held particular interest in Lake Alice because it absorbs almost everything that hits the ground at UF. Of the 400 storm drains on campus, 77% send stormwater directly to the lake.

The most recent data show that the lake exceeds maximum safe levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. That has been the trend for more than 30 years. That hydrological history is a microcosm for the state, a testament to the ecological impacts of urbanization.

“We need to change the way we operate on the landscape,” Clark says. “But the problem is we’ve already developed a huge amount of it. It’s really hard to go backwards.” 

Along with failure to regulate agricultural runoff, stormwater pollution is seen as one of the great shortcomings of the Clean Water Act. Every inch of impervious surface, from buildings to roads, worsens polluted runoff. Water cannot seep into concrete and asphalt. Instead, it slips and slides off hard surfaces into the nearest water body, picking up more contaminants on its journey.

“Many of the closest associations people have with a water body is actually a stormwater basin,” Clark says. “That connection between what’s happening here on campus and what’s happening in literally tens of thousands of stormwater basins around the state is the same.”

Across the nation, communities are recognizing the importance of nature-based solutions such as greenspace and other permeable surfaces near watersheds to clean up pollution and absorb the extreme rains associated with climate change. But UF in recent years has sought permission to pave over more land near the lake. 

UF’s Stormwater Master Plan, approved by the water management district in 2010, capped the number of additional impervious areas along the watershed to 169 acres through 2020. That’s an expanse almost 17 times larger than the lake’s 10 acres of open water. The plan did not require additional stormwater catchments to lessen harm to UF’s signature lake.

As of this year, buildings, parking lots and other slabs of concrete account for more than 40% of the watershed — covering nearly 460 of the 1,106 campus acres that drain into the lake. Almost twenty major construction projects are scheduled or in progress across campus.

Before, during and after the environmental reckoning of the early 1970s, generations of university administrators kept a more watchful eye on land-development opportunities than water-quality issues. But every generation, too, has its lake-loving advocates.

Ten years of protests and petitions proved successful for Tanzer and Alice’s Friends in the late ‘90s. The group defeated an 11-building student housing complex scheduled for construction at the lake’s edge. In 1999, the university amended its campus master plan to prevent construction of housing on the site.

“We ended up achieving a victory against the University of Florida,” Tanzer says. 

Now facing the global peril of rapid climate change and the biggest campus building boom in decades, a new generation of advocates for Lake Alice is needed like never before.

A return to respect, a new generation of care

Marian Azeem-Angel transferred to the University of Florida from Miami Dade College in August 2019. She felt unsure of what she wanted to study until she stumbled across Lake Alice. 

The 23-year-old looked out at a murky expanse, no doubt further obscured by the heat and humidity of a Gainesville summer. She felt pity for the water. 

Poor thing, Azeem-Angel thought to herself. She’s really green. She has a lot of growth.

Azeem-Angel was no stranger to murky water. South Florida is densely populated and notoriously developed. Cloudy canals and turbid ponds litter neighborhoods and golf courses. Since many waterways are human made, carved of earth for stormwater collection or a contrived view, they seldom prompt community concern when polluted. 

Yet this lake is the heart of Florida’s flagship university campus, home to legions of renowned water scientists and environmentalists. She wondered: why was its most prized water body green?

Azeem-Angel ultimately majored in environmental science, minored in soil and water science and based her final undergraduate project on testing campus water bodies for heavy metals and nutrients.

“The integrity of the water quality with Alice matters, especially if it’s being considered and treated as a conservation area, because it’s not just the immediate lake,” Azeem-Angel says. “A lot of native Florida species live there. If the water quality in Lake Alice deteriorates, then that effect moves upwards to all of the species that depend on Lake Alice.”

Her results are still preliminary, but they are the most recent attempt to gauge Lake Alice’s nutrient levels. The data show that ammonia levels have risen since the lake was last tested. Ammonia precedes nitrogen in the nitrogen cycle, which could suggest another nutrient uptick in the near future. More nitrogen could mean more algae.

Yet she says solutions are out there: additional stormwater basins and ponds for campus; replacing impervious surfaces with more greenspace across the watershed; using fewer of the herbicides now applied for the lake’s manicured aesthetic. 

Less strain on Lake Alice would lessen the impurities flowing into the Floridan Aquifer. It would mean less pressure on the fish, birds and other animals that are residents of the watershed.

Even if she will no longer be on campus to find out, she hopes the next line of students will benefit — and advocate.

In the meantime, Azeem-Angel brings her thirst for solutions abroad. She received a Fulbright grant to study in Denmark beginning this month. There, she measures rates of nitrogen removal and water filtration across city streams — a project she pitched herself, inspired by her last project on campus waters. Inspired by Lake Alice.

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Water quality concerns in rural Florida leave some families with groundwater wells dependent on bottled water in one of the most water-rich parts of the United States.

Samantha Kimmel and her husband bought their home in Suwannee County with the dream of creating a homestead. Unlike many other locals, they aren’t trying to farm for a living. But Kimmel’s eyes light up when she talks about her plans: Gardens full of food and cows grazing behind her home. Chickens and hogs and self-sufficiency. 

Though their 10-acre homestead is in its early stages, the Kimmels’ dream is beginning to materialize. Two bay horses graze in the field next to the driveway. Sweet Tea is the aptly named Southern belle; she loves everyone. Lucky is a wild mustang, only about a year and a half old.  

With just over 1,000 farms, Suwannee County has the charm of a small, close-knit community. Each town is the type of place where many people know each other’s names, their stories, some of them going back seven or more generations. Outside Live Oak — the county seat — old brick buildings sit tucked between new and restored ones, some crumbling on the side of the highway, history half-gone and full of wild-grown foliage. 

Just blocks away in historic downtown, colorful signs and shops invite tourists who pile into parks like Ichetucknee Springs, Wes Skiles Peacock Springs and Suwannee Springs. Visitors and locals alike rent kayaks and paddleboards to float and revel in the crystal-clear water.

But for some rural residents of Suwannee and nearby counties, the water that makes up the area’s famed springs and rivers is also a source of concern. In a region known for its natural water, some families that rely on private wells are living out of bottles and jugs, filtered pitchers and faucets.

Kimmel and her family settled in Suwannee County a little over a year ago, after roaming the country in an RV. When the pandemic and changes to their work life made traveling less accessible, she and her husband decided it was time to start building their homestead. 

Three years on the road in a 42-foot home brought the Kimmels close together. Samantha teaches environmental science online through Florida Virtual School, and her husband, Chad, works from home as an education program coordinator for an online high school. Their three children attend school virtually, too — all of them working from different computers under a shared roof. 

When they first toured their new home, it checked all the boxes. They wanted a fixer-upper, something with land and potential. The Kimmels paid for “normal home inspections,” made sure the hurricane tie-downs met legal requirements and had the roof looked over. They were told then the well was only two years old, only to later find out it wasn’t — just the pump was. Still, Samantha ran the faucet to check the water. At the time, it ran clear.

But the home sat for a while during renovations. When they visited, the water would run brown. 

Samantha started to do laundry, piling the family’s clothes into the machine only to be startled by brown sludge. They sent their water for testing soon after. 

The sample tested positive for total coliform, a category of bacteria present in the digestive tracts of animals, including humans. Although it could be harmless, it could also signal that their water contains E. coli or disease-causing pathogens.  

One year after that positive test, the Kimmels got used to living off bottled water. As an environmental science teacher, Kimmel said she dreads buying the single-use plastic.

“We’re looking into different things we can do instead,” she said, “But [there’s still] that bacteria. We need such precise filtration… And then we’re bathing in it, you know? We’re cooking with it.” 

In urban areas, utilities such as those run by the cities of Live Oak or Gainesville manage the public water supply, treating water to meet federal standards for drinking. Dirt and dissolved particles are filtered out, then the water is disinfected to kill parasites, bacteria, viruses and germs.

But about 15% of people nationwide, often in rural areas, rely on private or “domestic” wells for drinking water, which is not regulated or tested by government. These homeowners are responsible for testing their own water, and some have no idea they may have to shell out thousands of dollars to deal with the results.

In a study including over 2,100 domestic wells, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that one out of about five of them contained at least one contaminant “at a concentration greater than a human-health benchmark for drinking water.” 

The Kimmels aren’t the only ones in the area who have struggled with water quality. Michael “Mike” Roth and his wife, Cindy Noel, lived in Suwannee County for nearly 12 years. Like many families along the river, their whole life revolved around water.

Recently, they lost trust in it. 

When their water quality became visibly poor, Noel stopped drinking it. She and Roth both noticed it was turning brown. Roth believed plant life discolored the water, and he drank from the tap anyway. He quickly became ill.

“[I didn’t think it was] necessarily toxic,” Roth said. “Then last year, I got sick. And I felt like an idiot because I’d been drinking that water.” 

The couple would routinely test their private well water to make sure it was safe. Eventually, the water started testing positive for bacteria. But even before then, Noel was concerned with how nearby agriculture and livestock would affect her water.

Cows and crops

In neighboring Gilchrist County, metal nozzles spray brown water — a mix of water and manure — across rolling, green fields. The smell of the natural fertilizer bleeds into clean air, causing locals to roll up their car windows. The nutrient pollution can end up in the Floridan Aquifer, the groundwater that flows through it and the springs bubbling up from it. It can make its way into private wells and people’s homes — even in bottles.

One of the most common contaminants found in private groundwater wells in the USGS study was nitrate, associated in rural areas with sources including fertilizers, cow manure, animal-feeding operations and leaky septic tanks. This pollution can wash from farms into local waterways, ultimately making its way into the aquifer. Then, the groundwater is pumped up by private wells, flowing to people’s homes and faucets, then into glasses and pots and bathtubs. If locals aren’t getting their water tested regularly, they may have no idea. 

“You can’t smell it or taste [nitrate contamination],” said Bob Knight, director of the Howard T. Odum Florida Springs Institute. “It’s invisible, and it’s a poison.”  

Knight came to Gainesville as a college student and began studying the springs in 1979 with the pioneering ecologist H.T. Odum, one of the first scientists to document the structure and function of Florida springs ecosystems. After watching the blue pools decline for decades, Knight founded the non-profit Springs Institute in 2010 to research threats and solutions and educate the public. 

In 2018, the institute released a report on the impact of a dairy in Suwannee on the Floridan Aquifer and nearby springs. Mainly, the report focused on privately owned Troop Spring in Gilchrist County.

Just a mile and a half from Roth and Noel’s home, Troop Spring sits tucked between trees and houses fronting the Santa Fe River. Knight said his research shows that Alliance Branford (formerly American) Dairy has affected groundwater, “moving beneath these dairies [toward] the Santa Fe River and springs in [the] area.” 

Alliance Dairy cites sustainability and modern agricultural practices on its website — including efficient irrigation techniques and rotating crops for better nutrient management. Alliance employees did not respond to several requests for an interview or tour earlier this year.  

The Springs Institute report also found Troop spring contains nitrate concentrations “well above” both the state of Florida’s spring nutrient limit of 0.35 milligrams per liter and the federal drinking water criteria of 10 milligrams per liter, or 10 mg/L. When monitoring the spring from 2016 to 2018, the nitrate levels consistently tested between 43 and 61 mg/L, an average of 151 times the legal limit for springs.

The federal government set the 10 mg/L limit for nitrate in drinking water in 1992 to protect against what is known as “blue baby syndrome” in infants. The condition occurs when ingesting a high concentration of nitrate leads to oxygen deprivation in a child’s blood, and it can be fatal if left untreated.

Recent epidemiological research suggests the legal limit may not reflect what is safe for public consumption. Studies have found nitrate exposure via drinking water can lead to thyroid cancers and thyroid disease, birth defects and early-term labor — even from water sources below the federal limit. 

Nitrates are associated with many types of agricultural runoff, including dairies. Some dairy farmers use brown water in place of chemical fertilizers, citing the reuse of waste as sustainable agriculture. Large metal sprinklers span across the farms’ acreage, spraying the mixture of water and repurposed manure across green fields. But for every ton of manure produced by dairy cows, about 10 pounds of nitrogen can be introduced into the soil.

Locals pass these farms daily, enjoying the sights of historic rural Florida. But the beauty of these farms — with hundred-year-old oak trees and grazing calves — can be soured by the overabundance of manure. Even if passersby adjust to the smell, it’s piled up on farms out near the road. Thousands of pounds of waste sit waiting to be repurposed as fertilizer, composting or simply baking in the sun under a tattered plastic tarp.

But agriculture is a crucial piece of rural Florida. Statewide, agriculture brought over $7.6 billion into Florida’s economy in 2019. In Suwannee, the most recent agricultural census reported that 79% of the county’s farming revenue comes from livestock and associated products including dairy. Dairy operations have shifted to the region especially as development pushed the industry out of urbanizing areas. T.G. Lee, the historic Florida dairy founded in Orlando in 1925, now works with North Florida farmers such as Trenton-based Alliance Dairies Group. 

The statewide industry also shifted in the 1980s, an era of bitter complaints that nutrients were damaging freshwater habitats in South Florida, including Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. After a state buyout plan in 1986, 32 of the region’s 51 dairies left the area, many of them shutting down for good. Farms that wanted to stay were required to partner with the state to implement more environmentally sound practices. 

“If you didn’t do that, basically, you could exit the industry,” said Ray Hodge, executive director of United Dairy Farmers of Florida. “And many farms did … The vast majority of them closed and didn’t get back into the area.” 

Losing dairies means losing small businesses, farming families and livelihoods. 

Consumers pay more for food and milk products shipped longer distances. But as much as dairies are an asset to the economy, water advocates point out that tourism has grown much bigger, contributing nearly $97 billion to the state’s economy in 2019 alone. 

Noel, who lives near Alliance Branford Dairy and Troop Springs, is one of many locals who are hyper-aware of how thousands of cows and their manure might harm local water. Her experience has made her an activist for clean water. In 2017, she was arrested while protesting the Sabal Trail pipeline, a 517-mile interstate natural gas pipeline that now runs through Florida, Georgia and Alabama. 

Even then, she said, people were concerned about the dairies.

“Two girls didn’t fit in the paddy wagon with us,” Noel said. “So, they got to ride in a car with another cop… Every time they passed a dairy, [he told them,] ‘that’s what you should be protesting.’”

When best practices aren’t good enough

To protect the fragile Floridan Aquifer from agricultural runoff, the state of Florida relies on “best management practices” for farms, overseen by the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The techniques are intended to manage the amount of nutrients ending up in the soil and groundwater.

“We have a challenging context here,” said UF soil scientist Gabriel Maltais-Landry, who teaches sustainable nutrient management. Weather conditions including heavy rainfall and sandy soils leave Florida vulnerable to nutrient leaching, he said, especially when it comes to nitrogen. 

The rainfall — notorious and worsening in Florida due to climate change — drives an estimated third of nitrogen runoff, according to research. 

Maltais-Landry also said “maybe 40 to 50 percent” of the nitrogen we apply to crops in the US reaches the actual product. For Florida, it’s a system that’s “almost inherently inefficient.”

Hodge, with the United Dairy Farmers, has lived in rural Florida his entire life. As a lobbyist for the dairy industry and a seventh generation Floridian, he understands the unique challenges the state faces when it comes to nitrate management. 

“You can do everything right,” said Hodge. “You can… put your fertilizers out perfect. You’re following your [best management practices] … You do everything right, but you’re in Florida — you can’t control the weather.”

Another problem is that the best practices essentially rely on an honor system. Farmers in the Sunshine State operate under the “presumption of compliance,” meaning regulators trust them to implement these practices. Once they sign a statement of intent, farmers get credit for agreeing to reduce pollution. They are not, however, required to produce hard data to show they did so. 

Lawmakers, environmentalists and farmers here and across the state butt heads on a lot of issues, but they do agree on this: Even if best practices are perfectly executed, they’re not a catch-all. Data from the Springs Institute shows that, even as farms like Alliance employ best management practices and practice sustainable agriculture, springs and groundwater are still suffering. And some lawmakers are more committed to protecting industry than to protecting water.

Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, who owns a home and business in neighboring Columbia County, has probably spent more time in front of lawmakers and water managers than behind her cash register at Rum 138, her outfitter on the Santa Fe River. She and her husband moved to the area roughly 20 years ago when they bought property on the river with the intention of passing on a love for nature to their children. 

Shortly after moving in, Malwitz-Jipson saw a contractor walking along the riverbank, spraying clouds of an unknown chemical. 

“Don’t look at me,” he told her. “Go to the DEP.” 

That was her first-ever call to the Department of Environmental Protection. Since then, she estimates she’s made hundreds. 

But Malwitz-Jipson’s activism goes far beyond phone calls. It takes more than that to advocate for clean water. She organizes protests and events, circulates petitions and literature, and works to bridge gaps between farmers and environmentalists. She also educates her customers, which she considers a crucial role for water-based tourism businesses in Florida. 

Visitors pile into the Rum 138 van in flip-flops, swim shorts or wetsuits, ready to kayak or paddleboard on the river. Malwitz-Jipson takes a detour, guiding them through her neck of the woods. En route to the river, she passes the dairies and the local hot spots, offering names and stories and science while the van bounces along unpaved county roads. 

“They don’t come expecting an education,” she said. “They get one anyway.” 

Yet in her years of Florida activism, Malwitz-Jipson has never had a clear-cut victory. The losses that sting the most are the ones in front of legislators and water managers, where leaders who could make change look her in the eye before signing off on a new pipeline, another bottled-water permit, fewer trees. 

Recently, water advocates worry about a new law the Legislature passed this spring. The statute now allows citrus growers to apply fertilizer above the maximum rates recommended by industry professionals, including UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. If they hire a “certified crop advisor” to authorize the new amounts of fertilizer, the farmers’ practices will continue to fall under the presumption of compliance. 

The law also requires UF IFAS to analyze site-specific nutrient management for crops other than citrus and develop research plans and recommendations for nutrient management. IFAS will also be required to submit an annual report to lawmakers. 

But, over the next four years, citrus growers will essentially be free of any restriction of the amount of fertilizer they can apply, according to executive director of the Florida Springs Council Ryan Smart. 

“The law sets a dangerous precedent,” said Smart. “[It] would have disastrous water quality impacts if applied to all Florida agriculture.”

Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in June. 

Knight said the answer is not less regulation for agriculture, but more accountability for corporations. He believes part of the answer is limits on agriculture atop the most vulnerable parts of the Floridan Aquifer, including cutting down on the number of cows per farm. He and other environmentalists agree that, ideally, Florida should be managing what ends up in the water before it enters the soil instead of managing the pollution after the fact. 

“All these things are solvable,” Knight said. “A few people — corporations – are creating the majority of the problem.” 

Stewardship and solutions

In California, Huntington Farms grows produce including head and leaf lettuce, carrots, strawberries and celery on nearly 5,000 acres of land. At one point, the nitrate levels on the property were testing high. Manager Mark Mason said he had a few reasons for wanting to fix the issue. 

First, he said he wanted to prioritize being a steward of the land.

“[Realizing] there is a better way to do things than what’s been done over years in the past,” he said, “that’s a big motivator.”

Mason also believes regulation is coming, and he wanted to be ahead of the curve to keep the farm running smoothly. But one of his biggest incentives has always been the consumer. 

Though he doesn’t often hear it from the stores buying Huntington’s produce, Mason noticed a trend toward consumers demanding more ethically sourced food — including products that cause less harm to their environment.

A big part of this is managing nitrate levels, for which Huntington Farms uses a high-tech management strategy called precision agriculture. An app tracks water consumption, waste, nutrient loading in the soil and crop cycles to optimize the way Mason and his team water and otherwise tend to their crops. 

But Mason knows precision agriculture isn’t necessarily a solution for smaller farms. Even though the app is free, farmers earning smaller margins may not be able to afford the extra staffing. He also said, for farmers, overapplication of water and fertilizer is essentially “insurance.” It’s a huge risk for smaller farming operations to change anything about their growing when they rely on maximum yields to pay the bills. And the average farm size in Suwannee is 47 acres. In Gilchrist, 146. 

In Florida, private soil and water engineer Adelbert “Del” Bottcher says given the unknowns surrounding best management practices, high-tech solutions will likely be part of the answer to nutrient reduction in both urban and agricultural areas of Florida. The options include artificial wetlands; methane digesters that could use waste to generate biogas; chemical-treatment systems; vermiculture systems that use worms to break down organic solids; and shallow “interceptor” wells that treat nitrate-laden water before it is returned to the aquifer.  

But technological solutions can be costly. And unless such solutions are required or subsidized, environmentalists and farmers agree they won’t likely be used. 

Knight said the state’s Department of Environmental Protection has a responsibility to enforce surface water and groundwater nitrate standards. But regulators fail to do so, he said, and the responsibility is left up to individuals to police what comes up from the ground and out through their faucets. 

When the Kimmels first discovered dangerous bacteria in the well on their dream homestead up near Live Oak, the family used bottled water to wet their toothbrushes. The kids, all under the age of 10 at the time, struggled to conserve while doing so — but they knew better than to use the tap water. 

Now, they are using water from the tap again. The privilege comes with a new routine. 

“Don’t wet your toothbrush first,” their mother taught them. “Then rinse it in the sink. And don’t use your toothbrush until it’s completely dry.” 

“So far,” she said, “We haven’t gotten sick.”

The toothbrush victory is a small one. But families like the Kimmels are spending $50-plus a month on bottled water, hundreds of dollars to test their water, and potentially $1,000 to $8,000 for whole-house filtration systems. It’s not easy, especially for residents in an area where the  median income is just over $23,000.

Last month, the Kimmels sent a sample of their water for additional testing. The coliform bacteria are gone, and they have no idea why. Samantha Kimmel believes the issue may reoccur seasonally, since they hadn’t changed anything or treated their water. For now, they plan to install a UV filter for about $800. 

“We’re in a position where we can take care of this problem,” Kimmel said. “I just feel for the people who can’t… There’s a lot of people around here that just have to deal with what they have.”

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Florida’s pristine waters are its calling card for tourists, who are now returning to the state in record numbers. But what happens when crushing numbers of visitors harm the natural environment that draws them?

When Jeff Bowman first explored Key West in 1968, an expansive coral reef dominated the glimmering waters. Corals known as elkhorns branched out in warm hues so vibrant the water’s surface looked gold. The gilded branches housed their own ecosystem, like sunken treasure. “Picture a forest underwater,” Bowman remembers. “Beautiful.”

More than a half century later, Bowman and his wife, Trish Pleasant, get to spend every day on those same waters. The couple owns Namaste’ Eco-Excursions, a Key West business that offers sustainable snorkeling and boat tours. They take visitors through salty backcountry – shallow flats lush with outstretched mangroves that border the scattered islands.

But there’s a heartbreaking difference between today’s Key West and the one Bowman first visited as a 11-year-old boy: The beautiful branching corals are disappearing. Since then, half of Florida’s corals have died off. Elkhorn coral, the golden scaffolding Bowman saw in his youth, have been battered by bleaching and disease, unseen for years in Key West.

Reflecting their former careers as school teachers, Bowman and Pleasant start their tours with an educational program on the reef, sharing images of the sharks, parrotfish, butterfly fish and other creatures they’ve seen over the years. The material, bound in a home-made book they affectionately call the Reef Geek’s Guide to Coral Reef Ecology, is becoming more like a history of what was. Incorporating conservation, protection and sustainability into Namaste’s practices, they strive to share the wonder of the reef without further imperiling it. Sure, they’re making a profit. And that’s part of the reason they want to preserve the third-largest barrier reef in the world.

Pristine waters draw tourism. But too much tourism, in turn, can harm pristine waters. Over-tourism is a phenomenon when so many visitors descend on a destination that it harms that destination. The problem can extend to virtually every tourist activity, from the significant waste associated with the hospitality business to the ingredients in sunscreens that can be toxic to corals. Few tourist activities stir up controversy — or the waters — like the cruise ships that bring millions of passengers to fragile islands. Eco-tourism advocates like Bowman and Pleasant have been worrying about the vessels’ damage to Keys waters for years. The COVID-19 pandemic that emptied the Keys of the behemoth ships proved they were right.

Conchs to cruise ships

The southernmost tip of the country, Key West is a small island; only about 4 miles long and 2 miles wide. The city is home to about 23,000 residents, and its natives are called Conchs in honor of the iconic pink Queen Conch shell. Chickens roam freely, as do cats with abnormal numbers of toes. Old Town, Key West’s historic neighborhood, has a cozy, Victorian feel offset by its eclectic nightlife. The city is fun, funky and attractive to tourists. About three million of them a year were descending on the island by 2018.

One million of those came from cruise ships, which do not leave the waters unscathed. The arrival of the big, packed-to-the-brim tourist bearers decimates the bottom of the shallow channel they enter through—the same beautiful blue wonderland the cruises market on all their brochures.

Arlo Haskell, a Key West native, writer and filmmaker, is one of four founders of the Key West Committee for Safer, Cleaner Ships, a grassroots movement that advocates for smaller cruise ships. He says the cruises riddle the channel with debris. The most damage is done to the bottom, which is stirred up and battered by the ships’ giant propellers. The resulting silt plume can flow for miles, like an underwater dust bowl. Haskell says the plumes smother the endangered corals, which are already threatened by rising sea temperatures. From above, the water looks like milk. On the floor of the channel, the cruise ships can leave giant cavities like craters on the moon.

On their tours, Bowman and Pleasant explain how the reef has changed, not because of a single threat but rather, “death by a thousand cuts.” They learned the concept from the Keys marine educator Alex Brylske, who taught that each cut, whether from cruise ships or overuse of the reef or pollution, may not be fatal on its own. But the force of them together threatens the nation’s last living barrier reef.

The major problem isn’t tourism, Bowman says, but excess tourism that includes mega cruise ships. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020, Keys residents learned what their community would be like without it.

A moment of clarity

In October 2020, Key West’s streets were quiet. Non-residential traffic into the island was blocked. The sidewalks and shops normally filled with tourists were vacant. Cruise ships were given a no-sail order by the CDC.

The water started to clear. The halt in constant turbulence from above gave the channel a moment to breathe and to recover.

The island’s residents noticed first. The hazy silt clouds in the channel began to disperse. The gritty debris was noticeably absent — coral could be seen more clearly and dolphins didn’t flee in the big ship wakes. The cruises’ banishment began to look more like a reprieve.

Henry Briceño is a professor at Florida International University. He directs research in the university’s Water Quality Monitoring Network, which has worked with the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary to sample water quality for more than 25 years. The database provided Briceño an ideal way to study Key West’s water quality during the pandemic and compare it to former levels to determine if an improvement really took place.

The term Anthropocene, “the age of humans,” refers to the geological period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on the environment. Around the world, the pandemic slowed human activity enough to reveal what some scientists call the “Anthropause,” when waters cleared and animals returned to beaches and other areas. Briceño measured Key West’s water quality during this pause using three variables: turbidity, or how murky the water is; dissolved oxygen; and light penetration, which indicates how much sunlight reaches the ocean floor, where vegetation relies on it to grow.

Briceño’s findings showed that Key West residents were right: the water was clearer, at least on the surface. Turbidity was significantly lower in surface waters. Dissolved oxygen increased, and light penetration, while not statistically significant, had also changed for the better.

The dissolved oxygen increased despite a lowering of average temperatures, which normally would have lowered dissolved oxygen. This detail confirmed that something else — likely the pandemic — had caused the change.

Locals take a stand

In November 2020, a majority of Key West voters took a stand to keep their water as clean as it was during the no-sail order. They approved three ballot initiatives that would: limit the size and capacity of cruise ships allowed to dock at the island; limit the number of cruise ship tourists who could come ashore each day; and prioritize those cruise lines with the best environmental records.

Cruise lines have been under fire for their water quality records since the 1990s. Carnival Corp. paid its first large environmental fine in 2002 after a plea agreement in which the biggest cruise company in the world admitted to not only releasing oil waste into water, but falsifying records to cover it up. The corporation was charged $18 million and put on probation for five years. The company’s ships continued to violate pollution rules, including dumping plastic waste while on probation. Fines racked up to $60 million, less than 0.1% of Carnival’s profit.

The environmental NGO Friends of the Earth puts out a cruise ship report card each year. Few of the mega-cruise ship companies earn passing grades for the criteria, which include commitment to advanced sewage-treatment; reducing air pollution; complying with water-quality regulations; and whether the company is transparent in its environmental practices.

Yet within six months of local voters taking a stand against the largest cruise ships with poor environmental records, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law “prohibiting local ballot initiatives or referendum from restricting maritime commerce in the seaports of this state.” Part of a larger transportation bill sponsored by Sen. Ed Hooper, R-Palm Harbor, who chairs the Senate’s Commerce and Tourism Committee, the new law prohibits local government limits on any port “that has received or is eligible to apply for or receive state funding.” 

Key West was able to restrict ships at two of its port’s piers–Mallory Square and the Navy’s Outer Mole Pier– but not at privately-owned Pier B, which leases waterfront from Florida. This summer, the state pushed further when it expanded the area of water that Pier B leases to accommodate cruise ships. Proponents of the ships point out that the Port of Key West that includes Pier B has an annual impact of $85 million each year, nearly 15% of the city’s tax revenue. It also provides 1,250 direct and indirect jobs to Key West residents, or 5% of total citizens.

The battle continues back and forth. Haskell said Safer, Cleaner Ships will continue working to limit cruise ships at Pier B. “It’s our golden egg,” Haskell says. “We can’t kill the goose.”

“Destination Management”

Would limiting cruise ships really solve the island’s water-quality issues? Briceño says that while cruises are the biggest tourism-related threat to the Keys’ fragile environment, they aren’t the only ones. Even tourist escapades like paddle-boarding and snorkeling — typical ecotourism offerings — can harm the reef and surrounding waters. With thousands of visitors wading into the water each year, the chemicals from their sunscreen alone can damage the corals. (When Key West banned local sales of sunscreens containing oxybenzone or octinoxate, suspected to harm corals, the Florida Legislature passed a law restricting such local bans.)

Visit Florida is the state’s destination marketing organization. The government-funded agency is the hub for Florida tourism information, which is used to calculate the state’s tourism development tax, or “bed” tax. The goal on Visit Florida’s website is for Florida to become the No. 1 travel destination in the world. 

Orlando-based advertising agency Evok Advertising, which represents ecotourism businesses, found Visit Florida’s coverage of ethical, sustainable attractions like its clients — and those that weren’t theme parks — to be lacking. 

Another criticism of Visit Florida is that it lures more people into the state than Florida’s fragile environment can accommodate. Florida native Chad Crawford hosts the TV series “How to Do Florida,” in which he shares all the ways residents can fall in love with their state. He also uses his platform to shed light on Florida’s environmental issues. Crawford says the state gets so hooked on out-of-state and international tourism that it ignores its own residents, which also bring value when they visit across Florida. He emphasizes that for out-of-state or international tourism to continue, Florida needs what it pitches: a pristine, beautiful environment. “We wanted to be the most traveled-to destination,” Crawford says. “It should have been, ‘We want to be the best’.”

The sustainability-focused anthropologist Brooke Hansen directs the University of South Florida’s Sustainable Tourism Program. She says while Florida has plenty of marketing plans for tourism, it lacks what is known as a “destination management plan” to help guide how tourism should operate efficiently and sustainably. Students in her classes study global models — including tourism plans that work, and those that don’t — to ponder what kind of plan might work in Florida. Who would manage it? Visit Florida? The Florida Department of Environmental Protection? How would it be organized? By county?

The choices are not 100% clear, but there are notable examples elsewhere, including Hawaii, another state that thrives on tourism. Hansen studied Hawaii’s plan to manage travel in ways that recognize the environment, the economy and its indigenous people. . The plan sets out to ensure that tourism benefits Hawaii’s communities and people more than it burdens them. The plan’s annual survey of Hawaii residents shows that people generally think tourism is worth it, though they continue to feel that visitors are contributing to environmental damage, overcrowding and other problems. 

Hansen says Florida’s current tourism patterns are unsustainable because the number of people being lured to the state threatens to overwhelm the amenities they want to visit. It’s a lose-lose situation: If the scores of visitors drain Florida’s natural assets, tourism profits will shrivel up, too. 

David Randle is a co-founder and managing director of the Blue Community Consortium, a program that seeks to unite coastal communities around sustainable tourism and habitat protection. Key West and other coastal communities shouldn’t have to choose between economic and environmental well-being, says Randle, who also serves on the board of directors for the Florida Society of Ethical Ecotourism. Doing the right thing, he says, can also produce better profitability for local tourism businesses.

Blue Community developed 12 sustainable tourism strategies in partnership with Disney’s Animals, Science and Environment team, which saved the company $35 million a year in Florida. The example shows how intention, from mass transportation to reduced use of plastic and promotion of local foods, could benefit Florida and other tourism-dependent economies in the long run.

Back at Namaste’ Eco-Excursions, Bowman and Pleasant continue to emphasize citizen science and reef-friendly products despite the forces of mass tourism pressing around them. They share promising stories like the Plant a Million Corals Foundation, marine scientist David Vaughan’s efforts to reproduce fast-growing corals to restore lost reefs.

Bowman’s fond image of the underwater forest he saw 55 years ago has the hazy edges of a dream. But it is the picture of Key West waters he wants his kids and all future generations to enjoy. The golden reef is Florida’s golden egg; another fairy tale to be illustrated in his book, shared with visitors for years to come.

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50^th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. 

For a century, the glass bottom boat tours at Wakulla Springs celebrated Florida’s seemingly endless depths of clean, clear water. Today, with the water too murky to see through the glass, the boats are grounded — a symbol of the pollution plaguing the state’s freshwater and the cascade of consequences to come. 

Luke Smith glanced back at the passengers fixated on the glass portal to the watery world below. 

Below them, silvery fish darted below in water as clear as the glass they were looking through. The passengers hunched over to peer into the underwater world and take in its mysteries. Mastodon bones from millions of years ago lay waiting to reveal secrets of a newly born Florida. Vegetation whispered in patches along the bottom, providing hidden homes and hidey holes for the creatures that lived below. 

Smith knew exactly where in the springs those creatures were.

“A-a-a-a-alright Henry!” he chanted. “Meet us at the po-o-o-o-le. Wake up now ’cause you he-e-e-a-a-a-rd what I said.” 

Smith’s glass-bottom boat tour was a mix of talk and song, a well-honed performance that entranced his audience as he taught them about the mysterious depths of Wakulla Springs.

As if on cue, a fish “leapt” over a pole. Henry, the famous “pole-vaulting” fish, was rubbing his gills against the rod to clean them. But to the viewers, he appeared as skilled a pole vaulter as any track and field Olympian. Overjoyed by the spectacle, the group clapped and squealed with glee. Henry was always a hit. 

This was the average day for Luke Smith. Born in Wakulla County in 1901, the African American boat operator guided tours of the blue underworld day in and day out.

Operating the motorized glass-bottom boats was a heck of a lot easier than when he first started—rowing small boats with five to eight tourists peering into the clear waters with a glass-bottomed bucket.

Smith and other African American tour operators were some of Florida’s first nature guides. They described the vegetation — “nature’s flower box,” and 14 species of fishes — bream, catfish, bass. They shared Native American lore: “Mysteries of strange water,” Smith would share the meaning of the name “Wakulla.” The bottom seemed so close, as if you could reach deep down and stretch your legs long enough to skim the bottom.

As it drew tourists, Wakulla Springs was also a summertime staple for local Floridians. Year after year, kids would climb the old wooden tower proving they were courageous enough to take the plunge—not only from the first platform, but from the daunting heights of the second, too. 

The constant 72-degree water provided icy relief on the hottest of summer days and a glassy spectacle for those quieter winter days when the manatees would seek refuge from the chilly Gulf of Mexico. 

This was Florida. The real Florida. But today, this Florida is vanishing as its famous waterways become polluted. The once clear water of Wakulla Springs is a symbol for the state. The water has become so murky that the glass bottom boat tours no longer run regularly. 

They sit waiting like ghost ships in the night, patiently lingering for their next riders. The legacy of Luke Smith and his enchanting stories are no longer ferried across the water. 

Wakulla Springs has been identified by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) as one of the two dozen historic first-magnitude springs in Florida in need of restoration and protection. 

It is another victim of the Anthropocene. 

Human burdens 

Wakulla Springs is fed by the Floridan Aquifer. 

As rain and other surface waters filter down to the aquifer through the porous limestone that underlies Florida, it carries with it all traces of human existence. As water flows underground to Wakulla County, just south of Leon County, it carries pollution from septic tanks, sewage-treatment systems, agricultural runoff and a myriad of other burdens. 

A striking example of the resulting harm is nitrogen leaking from septic tanks, which use a drain field to treat sewage from homes that are not connected to centralized wastewater treatment plants. Many septic tanks, particularly old ones, allow excess nitrogen to seep through to the swiss cheese limestone and pollute the aquifer, Robert Deyle, vice president of the Wakulla Springs Alliance, explained.

The aquifer, in turn, feeds the springs. 

There are approximately 9,000 homes in southern Leon County’s “Primary Springs Protection Zone,” where the soil is more permeable and allows more pollutants through to the aquifer, according to Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor. 

As excess nitrogen filters into Wakulla Springs, it can fuel the growth of algae that smothers native vegetation, allowing nuisance weeds and invasive plants like hydrilla to outcompete and take over the ecosystem. 

This over-abundance of plant life that depends on nitrogen, particularly algae, propagates a greenish color in the water, according to the McGlynn lab in a three-part study to measure water quality and visibility. The high nitrogen levels can lead to the formation of algal mats that can shade out native vegetation, already burdened by the invaders. 

On a rainy day, things can get much more muddled. 

The darkened water conditions are a result of tannins, leaves that stain water a brownish-red, similar to steeped tea. Rains allows these tannins to leach organic matter, creating even muddier brown water. 

Tannin buildup in Wakulla and other springs isn’t all natural. While a moderate amount of tannins in the springs is normal, the excessive buildup that has distorted the water’s clarity and ended the glass bottom boat tours is a result of human impact. 

Wakulla Springs is connected to a variety of other springs through an elaborate network of underground waterways. Among these are over a dozen springs that make up the Springs Creek Springs Group. When rainfall is scarce, saltwater from the Gulf is no longer blocked by the spring’s outflow. Contaminating salts can form a “plug” that limits the spring’s freshwater from flowing out into the Gulf, Deyle explained. 

As a result, connected springs like Lost Creek reverse the direction of their flow. Instead of bubbling up from the aquifer, Lost Creek dumps in and flows north to Wakulla Springs. The discharge carries the color-leaching tannins that turn the water dark brown. 

Groundwater overpumping aggravates the problem, as pollution concentrates in shrinking water bodies. An estimated 3.6 billion gallons of groundwater are pumped in Florida every day, according to the US Geological Survey. And demand may be growing in one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, with an estimated 950 people moving to Florida every day, according to a 2020 Miami Report.  

One study found a correlation between the duration and frequency of these reversal events and an increase in algae proliferation, meaning each cause of color changes to the springs may be exacerbating the other. 

Other factors, like climate change, continue to pose threats to Wakulla Springs and worsen existing problems. 

Septic tanks depend on a protective layer of unsaturated soil between the drain field and the aquifer. As climate change drives more frequent extreme weather events, which can raise the water table, it reduces that important soil layer. Improperly treated wastewater can make its way to the groundwater—not only soiling springs, but the drinking water source for 90 percent of Floridians. 

The increasing rainfall can also reduce the amount of oxygen in the soil, a critical component that helps breakdown pathogens in the wastewater, according to a study on wastewater management. 

The accumulating harm also poses a threat to Wakulla’s wildlife, an indicator of the declining health of the ecosystem as a whole. 

Several bird species, including ospreys, are on the decline. Others birds, like anhingas, are altering their habits to accommodate the changing ecosystem by consuming crayfish, whose populations have been high as a result of all the decomposing organic matter.

Other species remain, but hidden under the darkened waters, decreasing the sights to see on the remaining boat tour, the jungle cruise.  

Pushing for Progress

With continuing research and attention on Wakulla Springs, citizens and scientists, advocates and state and local leaders are working to return the watery wonder to its former beauty. 

One of the first, notorious culprits of nitrogen pollution came from the state capital, itself. For decades, Tallahassee disposed of treated wastewater in spray fields used for irrigation. The practice led to heavy nitrogen infiltration into groundwater that ended up in Wakulla Springs, according to a report by the US Geological Survey. 

Tallahassee invested in a $227 million upgrade to its water-treatment system to remove about 75% of the nitrogen from the water so it meets state-regulated levels. 

However, Deyle said those levels are still being debated among experts as to whether they are enough to balance the ecosystem. And not all the area’s waste flows through the treatment plant. Nitrogen from wastewater has been sneaking into the springs through outdated septic systems that don’t have the technology to remove nitrogen before it is leaked into drainfields. 

Even many modern systems leak more nitrogen than they did when they were initially installed. A 2010 study found that numerous septic systems in Wakulla County were releasing three times more than the amount of nitrogen allowed by ordinance. 

The work to repair and restore the spring is a race against time and unprecedented growth. 

In 2018, Leon County launched the first phase of its septic-to-sewer project, totaling $9 million so far in state grants to improve water quality problems arising from septic tanks in the Primary Springs Protection Zone.

So far, Leon County has removed 252 septic tanks, according to Michelle Presley, public information specialist in Leon County. The county’s strategic plan aims to remove 500 more by 2026. 

There are 50,000 septic tanks between Leon and Wakulla County. Yet even as local leaders work to take out old septic tanks, they are allowing new septic systems to be installed every day. 

From 2015-2020, over 500 new septic tanks were installed in Leon County and Wakulla County each, according to the Florida DOH. 

While improved or inspected septic tanks can pose less of a threat for leaking nitrogen, they are not a permanent solution to a persistent problem. And Wakulla County is growing. The county has grown almost 10% from 2010 to 2020, according to Florida’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research. 

In 2021, Wakulla County announced funding from the DEP for its own septic upgrade and sewer connection project. It will connect only 50 homes to central sewer, and use the balance of funds to upgrade other septic systems in the area.

Proctor, one of the Leon County commissioners, said he hopes next steps will include collaboration between the two counties on research, education and other solutions.

Wakulla Will Not Be the Last 

Florida has the largest concentration of freshwater springs in the world.

Wakulla Springs is just one of Florida’s 1,000 freshwater springs. But it offers a warning for what may be to come—and what has already started—for other iconic springs.

Silver Springs still runs its historic glass bottom boat tours but is dealing with its own host of threats, including excessive nutrient pollution. The spring’s nitrate-nitrogen concentration is 3,100 percent higher than it was naturally, according to the Florida Springs Institute. A key point in its recommended plan for restoration: remove septic tanks, the source of a quarter of the pollution, and connect the houses to a central sewer system. 

Two dozen other springs have been identified as nitrogen-impaired and are undergoing projects and research to solve their chemical imbalances. On this list is the famous Weeki Wachee Springs, best known for its mesmerizing mermaids. 

Rick Kilby, author of several books about springs, remembers the magic of watching the Weeki Wachee mermaids swim around behind their glass enclosure. The water, “clear as gin,” made it look as if their hair was being pulled up by strings.

That clarity has begun to diminish with Weeki Wachee’s own nitrogen pollution, 30% of which has been identified as coming from septic systems in the area. 

Other factors are also to blame. Agricultural runoff, groundwater overpumping, the warming climate and other pressures of the Anthropocene all have roles in the deterioration of many springs. Where people a century ago looked passively through the glass to enjoy them, scientists and advocates said it will take working together to save them. 

C’mon Henry

People’s passion for the springs is evident across the state: the wonder of the Weeki Wachee mermaids, the relaxation of tubing down the Ichetucknee, the awe of listening to Florida folklore on the glass bottom boat.  

“A lot of people will go to a spring like Ginnie or Ichetucknee and think it’s clear enough,” Kilby said. “But that’s because they never saw it before it was like this, before it was polluted.” 

Wakulla offered a look into the primitive Florida. 

The sights probed the imagination of every passenger on that boat. It allowed each man, woman and child to be a pioneer discovering Florida for the first time. 

It gave us guides who understood it and spoke to its enchantments. And foreshadowed its future. 

In the wise chants of Luke Smith, “Wake up now ’cause you he-e-e-a-a-a-rd what I said.”

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

New research finds that human pollution influences the severity of red tides more directly than scientists previously understood. The connection sheds light on the need for better water-quality monitoring statewide — and ultimately, to reduce the nutrient pollution flowing into Florida’s waterways.

When the ominous rust-colored cloud of red tide begins to saturate coastal waters in Southwest Florida, it means beach closures. Asthma attacks. Itchy skin and watery eyes. Dead fish and a wretched smell that can spoil the salty breeze. 

Now, scientists also know it means pollution made the scourge worse. 

New research from University of Florida scientists is “providing clarity in what was previously a muddied landscape,” said environmental engineer Christine Angelini, a co-author of the study.

While red tides occur naturally, scientists have long debated the degree to which they are worsened by high levels of nutrients such as nitrogen from human sources agricultural and urban. Scientists had previously found correlation between so-called nutrient loads and red tide. But the new research offers some of the strongest evidence yet that humans directly influence the severity of the toxic blooms.  

The study focuses on the Caloosahatchee River in Southwest Florida, which carries water and pollutants from Lake Okeechobee as it flows west to the Gulf of Mexico.

In the past, scientists looked for a direct relationship between nitrogen and red tide. But excess nitrogen doesn’t cause red tide — it exacerbates it, an effect that can take weeks. Looking for a short-term correlation did not implicate pollutants. 

The scientists tapped longer-term data from water-quality and red tide databases maintained by the South Florida Water Management District and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, respectively. By analyzing biweekly nitrogen and red tide patterns over nine years, they were able to detect a more complex cause-and-effect relationship.

The results show a clear link between increasing amounts of nitrogen coming out of the Caloosahatchee and the intensity of red tide on the coast, Angelini said. 

“There has been this kind of uncertainty about whether there is this human link,” said Angelini, director of UF’s Center for Coastal Solutions. “For the first time, this paper really shows that.”

Pinpointing specific causes of high nutrient levels was not the focus of the study, Angelini clarified, but scientists are well aware of the primary causes.

Many of these major nutrient polluters — excess agricultural fertilizers, underground septic tank leaks, urban stormwater runoff — are “nonpoint sources,” meaning they pollute waterways diffusely as opposed to from a single point, like a pipe. Such pollution, not regulated by the Clean Water Act, is the leading remaining cause of water-quality problems across the nation.

A natural history of blooms

Records of red tides are found in the earliest chronicles of Florida. The Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca noted in the 16th century that native people marked seasons based on “the times when the fruit comes to measure and when the fish die and the stars appear, in the observance of which they are very skilled and well-practiced.”

But in the 21st century, red tides have become so intense that they’ve caused harm to ecosystems and people — and scientists have seen evidence that they could be getting worse.

Florida in 2018 and 2019 experienced one of the worst red tides in its history, lasting 15 months and causing respiratory infection outbreaks and leaving dead marine life along the southwest coast.

Red tide is a type of harmful algal bloom. It’s caused by a single-celled species called Karenia brevis that feeds on nitrogen and phosphorus — the two nutrients of highest concern in Florida’s waterways. An excess of these nutrients can cause “blooms,” when the organisms multiply out of control. In the process, the algae suck oxygen out of the water and produce a neurotoxin that can cause respiratory problems in humans.

“Having this connection to people on the coast means that we can have an impact on the future,” said Eric Milbrandt, a co-author and director of the marine laboratory at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “We can engineer, we can regulate, [and] we can decrease the nutrients and potentially then decrease algae blooms.”

Milbrandt and others on barrier islands in Southwest Florida have witnessed red tide in their own backyards. He says they have seen them intensify over the past decade near the mouth of the Caloosahatchee.

During a bloom, K. brevis turns the water opaque and tints it the color of root beer — Milbrandt’s apt description. When the wind blows, these organisms release toxins that cause runny noses, eye irritation, coughing and asthma attacks.

Marine life suffers, too. The neurotoxins make it difficult for fish to move their gills, effectively suffocating everything from “tiny anchovies to goliath groupers,” Milbrandt said. One year, a whale shark washed ashore — an animal that can grow up to 33 feet long. Even invertebrates on the seafloor can die from severe red tide events that create oxygen-depleted zones underwater. The rotting marine life causes a “horrible” stench, he added.

“Red tide happens, and we’re never going to make it go away completely,” said UF environmental scientist Miles Medina, lead author of the new study. “But if we can reduce the impacts that go along with it, we think that’s worth looking into.”

In search of data-rich waterways

Scientists at the Center for Coastal Solutions are working with SAS Analytical Software, an independent company, to create a public portal in the next three to five years that standardizes public-facing water-quality data from multiple organizations, agencies and other partners around Florida – like a “one-stop shop for data,” Milbrandt said.

The resource aims to integrate different types of data–like red tide and ocean currents, for example– using standardized measurements. Doing so will make it easier to obtain more comprehensive environmental data from anywhere in Florida, Medina explained.

“You need enough data to work with,” Angelini said. “We would love to be able to do this analysis in all the different watersheds across the state, but there isn’t sufficient information to apply these types of approaches necessarily everywhere.”

The Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation’s River, Estuary and Coastal Observing Network, known as RECON, offers an example of how small organizations can contribute to this larger database. RECON consists of seven stations collecting hourly water-quality data, including dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, algae, and a measure for nitrogen and phosphorus.

Milbrandt, who helped start and continues to monitor the network, said it captures shorter-term events that allow scientists to see what’s happening over a few days or weeks as opposed to monthly data that creates gaps. With monthly samples, “you’ll miss the most important things happening,” Milbrandt said, such as intense rain that might churn sediment, altering conditions over the span of perhaps only a few days.

The detail allowed them to better understand observed patterns in the estuary and thus make stronger conclusions about the study’s results, like detecting the lag time between changes in freshwater flow and changes in red tide abundance.

RECON is inexpensive and easy to maintain, Milbrandt added. It requires a humble team of two people and a small boat.

Increased collaboration between agencies and organizations to collect more frequent and abundant data is now happening, Milbrandt explained, such as ramped-up efforts for more red tide monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico.

“This is where organizations…that understand the value of continuous data can come in and fill a gap,” Angelini said.

If Florida had a streamlined, statewide data network, she added, we could “start to draw conclusions that we couldn’t draw before.”

The Caloosahatchee as a microcosm

Making the direct link between human activity and red tide severity was an important step in science, the authors explained, and sheds light on the state at large.

“What’s happening in this watershed is not dissimilar to many other places in the state of Florida,” Angelini said.

Agricultural fertilizers remain a top contributor to nutrient pollution. While “best management practices” aim to minimize fertilizer use and prevent excess nutrients from seeping into water, compliance and enforcement are inconsistent.

Another big source of nutrients is outdated infrastructure to handle stormwater runoff and wastewater treatment. As more people have moved into Florida’s urban centers, the technology used to treat waste and stormwater has failed to keep up with swelling populations and the more-severe storms associated with climate change. In rural areas, septic tanks remain a concern.

There’s another consideration, too. When humans manipulate natural water flows, they also move pollutants.

The Caloosahatchee River’s flow is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which decides how much water to discharge from Lake Okeechobee based on weather conditions such as higher volumes of rain and how much water can safely be held behind the Herbert Hoover Dike, which is about 80 years old and poses flooding risk to surrounding communities.

Though necessary to keep people safe from a flood catastrophe, this control creates unnatural flows of polluted water from the Caloosahatchee to the west and the St. Lucie River to the east compared with historical water flows before the Everglades were drained.

“Water either goes out or doesn’t, and that’s a human decision,” Medina said.

An important lesson for Florida

The results of the study signaled to the authors one important takeaway: If humans are influencing environmental flare ups in one area, the same likely goes for other waterways.

Red tide is to Southwest Florida as fish kills are to Miami’s Biscayne Bay, and both regions struggle with algal blooms.

Nitrogen, among a long list of other pollution concerns, is a “persistent problem” causing harmful algal blooms year after year, explained John Kominoski, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at Florida International University.

Algal blooms have raised added concern in South Florida as summers have gotten hotter, sometimes causing massive fish kills like the one in August 2020.

Kominoski refers to Biscayne Bay as a “trouble spot.” Better data and water-flow management are both keys to understanding the source of the bay’s problems, Kominoski explained. An extensive canal system has altered historical water flows from the Everglades, meaning higher concentrations of nutrients get dumped into Biscayne Bay all at once.

“If we can figure out where nitrogen is a problem, like our canals, we can be aware of what the nitrogen levels are when we open water and release it into the bay,” he said.

Once he and other scientists locate pollution hotspots, he said they can start to find solutions, such as releasing nitrogen back to the atmosphere.

“If we can’t manage nitrogen and phosphorus and regulate that — and that’s like the ‘easy stuff’ — then we have our work cut out for us,” Kominoski said. “The nitrogen issue is a challenge, but it’s fixable.”

Despite a $23 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan to restore water quality in South Florida, the region still lags behind examples like Tampa Bay, where cooperation and commitment to stem nutrient pollution have helped restore clarity, seagrasses and marine life.

Long-term plans can overlook short-term needs, says David Tomasko, director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program in southwest Florida and a co-author of the red tide study.

“[Biscayne Bay] has needed nutrient load reduction projects, like, yesterday,” he said. “You don’t have 10, 20 years.”

In contrast, Tomasko says Sarasota Bay is “on a positive trajectory,” explaining that water quality has improved over the past five years.

The Sarasota Bay Estuary Program is part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Estuary Program, which helps communities across the nation develop management plans based on science to inform a policy board of local elected officials, state representatives and members of the EPA. Tampa Bay, Indian River Lagoon and Charlotte Harbor are Florida’s other program locations.

The program’s scientists recommend how much they need to reduce nutrients from flowing into the bay, which they determine based on current and historical water quality data. Florida’s water was never quite “pristine,” Tomasko said, but humans have made it worse.

“We’re making it more likely that we’re going to get all sorts of nutrient-related algal blooms, and that’s seemingly what’s happening,” he said.

Beyond algal blooms, seagrass losses statewide have been the oft-ignored “canary in a coal mine,” Tomasko added, which has an impact on fisheries, manatee deaths and carbon storage in marine environments.

“In Sarasota Bay, we’re confident we can turn this around, because we’ve identified the scope of the problem, identified what needs to be done, and our local governments have stepped up to the plate,” he said.

Tomasko added that political differences don’t always stand in the way of environmental progress, using Sarasota as an example of cooperation for cleaner water.

“There hasn’t been a Democrat elected to the Sarasota County Commission in 20 years, and it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They understand water quality, and so our local governments have committed to spending $900 million over the next five to 10 years to adjust water quality.”

In March, Sarasota celebrated a more than $200 million project to renovate the largest wastewater treatment plant in the watershed, which Tomasko expects to reduce nutrient loads by up to 90%.

He added that it’s not enough to spend $30 million on an area like Indian River Lagoon that requires $5 billion worth of repair. “Statewide, we need to make sure people understand how big the problem is and how much money is going to be required to turn it around,” he said.

That said, it doesn’t make sense to invest billions in restoration without also working to stem pollution and the crises it causes.

“There’s a number of locations here in the state where we have to fix the quality of the water before we can think about regrowing seagrass meadows or mangrove forests or oyster reefs,” Angelini said. “We’ve got to work on water quality first.”

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50^th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. 

After decades of pollution suffocated Tampa Bay and killed half its seagrass and much of its marine life, unprecedented political cooperation and hundreds of science-guided projects brought the estuary back to life. Tampa Bay became a symbol for the success of the Clean Water Act of 1972, and humanity’s ability to clean up pollution. But in the 50th anniversary year of the Clean Water Act, seagrasses and fishes have begun to die again. The Bay is losing ground — again a symbol, this time of declining water quality after a half-century of gains.

The burnt-rotten stench of sulfur hung over Tampa Bay. Socialites living on Bayshore Boulevard, one of the most coveted water-front addresses in the city, watched their silver dishes, silverware and heirlooms tarnish. They knew the culprit was coming from the Bay, but had no idea exactly what it was.

Through much of the 20th century, well into the 1970s, phosphate plants and coal-burning power plants pumped sulfur dioxide into the skies over Tampa Bay without opposition. Industries, farms and local governments dumped waste into the bay and its connecting waterways — even raw sewage.

“It’s some of the nicest real estate in Tampa, and it was almost uninhabitable,” said Evan Bennett, a Florida Atlantic University history professor working on an environmental history of Tampa Bay. “Women along Bayshore in the 1950s and 1960s were complaining regularly that not only did it tarnish the silver — but it would erode silver.”

Activism from those kinds of wealthy homeowners, Bennett said, made politicians take notice of a dying Bay. The pollution ruining the silver was ruining sea life too. Nearly half of the Bay’s seagrasses were wiped out by 1982. The decades that followed saw some of the worst fish kills in Florida history. Manatees reached the brink of extinction.

Political will made Tampa Bay one of the nation’s shining examples of how a region could come together — with local, state and federal government working with citizens, NGOs and industry to clean up water pollution. Unprecedented cooperation over decades culminated in Tampa Bay becoming a national model for restoration and the success of the Clean Water Act.

But today, Tampa Bay is again plagued by fecal and industrial pollution and other dangers. Seagrass levels in the Bay peaked in 2016 at more than 42,000 acres. Now that number has dipped to 35,000 acres. Manatees, which had returned to the Bay alongside seagrass, were taken off the endangered species list in 2017. Now they are dying in record numbers. Algae blooms over the last five years have led to some of the worst fish kills in Tampa Bay since the 1970s.

On the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act of 1972, Tampa Bay is still a model for what political will, cooperation and regulation can achieve. It is also an example of the limitations of the half-century-old law amid weak state pollution control; intense population growth; and climate change. 

Like other waterways across Florida, Tampa Bay is losing its shine.

Tarnished history: “You didn’t want to go in the water”

In the mid-20th century, phosphate plants were allowed to dump their wastewater into the Alafia River, which flows into Tampa Bay, Bennett said. Municipal sewage plants did little to no cleanup.

“It was sort of level one, throw a little bleach on it,” Bennett said. “And then they would dump it right back out into the canals.”

But resistance to pollution was different in Tampa Bay than in other areas because its governments and industries couldn’t simply push pollution off on poor communities, Bennett said. The Bayshore Boulevard society women demanded an environmental impact study, published in 1969. It documented algae blooms and six feet of sludge trapped on the floor of the estuary. 

Tampa Bay saw its worst period of water quality in the 1970s, just as the Clean Water Act was being applied, said Bennett, who grew up just over a mile from the Bay.

“We joked that you didn’t want to go in the water in a lot of places because it was simply too polluted.”

The City of Tampa made history in 1979 with the opening of the Howard F. Curren Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, which reduced nitrogen loads into the Bay by 90%. To prove the drastic improvements, Tampa city officials toasted their achievement by drinking the plant’s discharged water from champagne flutes.

But it would take hundreds more projects over decades to bring the Bay back to life. Bennett remembers biking to Ben T. Davis Beach in the 1980s with his older siblings. The wide beachfront — later eroded by Hurricane Elena — was a popular spot for working-class Tampanians. 

When he was about five, Bennett said, his sister bought him a snorkeling mask for Davis Beach.

“I remember putting my head in the water and being like really disappointed because I thought having a mask, I’d be able to start seeing all kinds of things,” he said. “The clarity was always really low.”

He mostly remembers the trash, which washed up to litter the shores and got tangled in the mangroves. Beaches around the Bay were sometimes shut down due to fecal pollution warnings. “They were simply looking at Tampa Bay as kind of a sink,” Bennett said.

In 1982, Upper Tampa Bay Conservation Park opened to provide natural areas and a learning center to teach young children about the Bay’s environment. “One time we had a field trip to the causeway, and we took a big dragnet and pulled in everything we could,” Bennett said. “There wasn’t really a whole lot in that net.”

Still, the park was an early step toward remaking a natural bay, he said. “It sort of stands as a turning point in the education about the Bay.”

A national model

In 1991, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized Tampa Bay as an “estuary of national significance,” clearing the way for a comprehensive management plan for the still-struggling Bay. The nation’s estuary programs — there are 28 nationwide, including four in Florida — are funded by the Clean Water Act. Later that decade, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program became an independent special district of Florida, allowing it to build collaboration between public and private sectors in the Tampa Bay region.

Maya Burke, assistant director for the TBEP, says this collaboration since 1998 has helped keep everyone on the same page.

“We spell out line by line, all of the things that our partners are interested in doing,” she said. “And it has to be unanimously approved and adopted by all of those entities who sit around our table.” 

Every five years, the program gathers officials in the community to rework its Interlocal Agreement, which guides the next half-decade of work cleaning up the Bay. 

“There’s real value in taking the time to express those things and, you know, being real clear about our commitments to each other,” Burke said.

In her nearly two decades in the field, she said moderate politics and water ethics have allowed community leaders to stretch across the aisle for the good of the estuary. The EPA has heralded TBEP as “a model for similar efforts by other community-based programs.”

Indeed, Bennett attributes many of Tampa Bay’s water-quality successes to collaboration between advocates and politicians — something that isn’t often seen at the state level.

“I think Tampa Bay is lucky to this extent that the activism around it started in the 1960s and ‘70s, while there was still a significant chunk of bay,” he said. “There was also a political moment where environmentalism was something both parties latched onto.”

All in all, TBEP has funded hundreds of projects in its three decades, from research to restoration to “mini grants” that get the community involved in renewing the Bay. The results have been dramatic. The program’s Nitrogen Management Consortium, a public-private partnership of key cities and industries bordering the bay, reduced nitrogen flowing into the bay by more than 400 tons in one decade even as the region’s population grew by nearly a million people. 

As nitrogen levels decreased, seagrasses grew back. Seagrass coverage, which had plummeted to near 20,000 acres by 1982, doubled to 40,000 acres by 2016.  

Over the past two years, however, seagrasses have begun to die back again. Last summer and fall saw what scientists described as the worst red tide outbreak and fish kills the bay had seen since the early 1970s. Earlier this year, Florida’s Harmful Algal Bloom Task force warned that “without hard work and careful planning, the challenges created by harmful algal blooms are likely to worsen due to the influences of other environmental stressors associated with climate change and Florida’s growing population.”

Continuing pollution threats

If you stand on Bayshore Boulevard today and look east across the Bay, you’ll see two mountain tops on the otherwise flat Florida landscape. These are mounds of radioactive phosphate waste, called “gypstacks,” with huge lagoons on top full of radioactive wastewater too dangerous to dispose of. These stacks, at Riverview,  stand as reminders that the industry’s waste can pollute indefinitely.

Across the Bay to the south in Manatee County last year, officials detected a leak in the wall that holds back polluted water at the Piney Point phosphate mine, which shut down 20 years ago, and pumped more than 200 million gallons into Tampa Bay to reduce pressure and avoid a worse disaster.

Earlier this month, scientists from TBEP, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida and others published new research showing that the spill, in sending a year’s worth of nutrients into the Bay over 10 days, “may have created conditions in Tampa Bay conducive for the extreme bloom concentrations.”

Like other parts of Florida, Tampa Bay must cope with such “legacy pollution” on top of new threats associated with population growth and climate change. Rising temperatures are causing more-extreme rains and storms, which in turn worsen floods that carry pollution to waterways. In the years since the Clean Water Act, so-called “non-point source pollution,” namely stormwater runoff from residential and agricultural nutrients, has become the single-largest source of nitrogen in Tampa Bay — and into many waterways across the nation. 

Tamara Pierson, water issues co-chair for the Tampa Bay Sierra Club, says that septic tanks are a particular scourge. Pierson has lived in Tampa since 2004, and while the stench isn’t as strong as it used to be, she still catches the occasional whiff.

“When I first came here, it stunk like an outhouse and I was always like, ‘What is that?’” she said. “It smells like poop, but it couldn’t really be. And come to find out it is.”

There are 120,000 septic tanks in Hillsborough County, which contain nitrogen levels 65 times that of Tampa’s sewage-treatment waste. This septic waste seeps into the groundwater, which makes its way into the aquifer  —  a major source of Florida’s drinking water.

“And you’re really just throwing all of the human waste  —  urine and feces  —  into the water,” she said. “It’s just disgusting.”

Lindsay Cross, who spent 14 years at TBEP and is running for a state House seat, said the Bay area has started moving away from septic systems, but many are still around.

“They’re still our septic systems,” she said. “And they fail.”

Cross called for a statewide septic inspection program, which has been proposed and shot down by the Florida Legislature for years. Septic inspections bills haven’t made it to a single committee hearing.

“It’s not for lack of people trying or knowing the right things to do,” Cross said. “It’s because there hasn’t been the political will to do it.”

She cited added costs to taxpayers, local government and developers as the biggest roadblock to the legislation passing.

“The more we delay this, the more it’s going to hit us in our pocketbooks later,” Cross said. “And in the meantime, we’ll see the quality of our life decrease.”

Thomas Hallock, founder of the nonprofit Friends of Salt Creek and a professor of English who works on environmental humanities at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, said despite local and regional successes, it’s difficult to keep the Bay pristine given reluctance to regulate pollution during the administrations of former Gov. Rick Scott and current Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Their policies literally wash up on our shores,” he said.

It’s no secret Florida struggles to balance growth and development with environmental protection. But Cross said the balance got out of whack after the Scott Administration eliminated Florida’s Department of Community Affairs, which oversaw cities’ growth and development planning.

Some of the worst pollution and algae blooms in the Bay, Cross said, are in east Hillsborough and Manatee counties, where urban sprawl has taken off. “When you have more people, you have more pollution,” she said.

The root problem in Florida environmental policy, she said, is “the failure to adopt more aggressive laws.”

“That’s one of the most damaging things that has happened  —  intentionally  —  in recent years,” she said.

The estuary program and an aging advocate population 

Bennett said balancing the environment and development has been key to the collaborative spirit in the Bay. “The phosphate industry is a really important industry and you’re never going to get rid of the port,” he said. “Nor are you going to really get rid of development.”

With Tampa Bay’s rich advocacy network and involved citizens, he said, the cooperation can continue to lead to progress. “It was everyday people, people who like to go to Ben T. Davis Beach, people who like to go out on the Gandy and pull out their chair in the afternoon and go crabbing,” he said. “They own that Bay as much as anybody else.”

Bennett cited the nonprofit Tampa Bay Watch as the kind of powerful advocacy organization that serves as a watchdog and draws citizens to work on the Bay. “They are out there watching like hawks.”

Peter Clark, founder of Tampa Bay Watch, has worked since the early 1990s to help clean up the Bay’s water quality. The nonprofit’s mission is that it “trains and organizes citizen volunteers” to protect the watershed.

“As a scientist, you live and learn from these problems and solutions in the Bay,” Clark said. “But as a fisherman and an environmentalist, you hate to see that level and impact occur in your backyard.”

Backyards are where many of Tampa Bay’s advocates have always been watching from. Bennett said the Bay’s activism over the many decades traces back to the grassroots. Now, he, Burke and others worry that the advocacy population is aging.

 “A lot of the people that have been doing this work and have spent 30 years or more working together, they’re starting to retire now,” Burke said. “We have to make sure that we don’t lose that kind of magic of how to work together.”

Hallock agreed that “there’s an old guard aging out.” But he points to a rising generation, including Burke, who have dedicated their lives to cleaning up the Bay. Hallock and other Florida environmental scholars call them “Marjorie’s,” paying homage to Florida’s history of women environmental activists like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who helped save the Everglades, and Marjorie Harris Carr, who helped stop the Cross Florida Barge Canal half a century ago.

“I do think in this 20s and 30-somethings crowd, that there’s a whole generation of Marjorie’s out there,” Hallock said. “Who really have both a professional commitment, but then also have a private commitment and it really extends well beyond earning a paycheck.”

Though Tampa Bay has suffered all kinds of wounds like silver-tarnishing toxins and recent waste spills like Piney Point’s, it survives due to a community of advocates, researchers and government staff who listen to each other. The same can’t be said for many other areas of Florida, Bennett said.

“If you look at Indian River Lagoon, every time I see the reporting from there I want to bang my head into the wall,” he said. “A lot of the lessons that could have been learned from Tampa Bay were not applied.”

This story is part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ series WATERSHED, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50^th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, supported by Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.