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Sierra Club urges scrutiny of human link to red tide The group says runoff from shore has to be a factor The Florida Sierra Club says red tide research money should go to scientists willing to look at a connection between nutrient runoff and the algal blooms.
Scientists for the state and Mote Marine Laboratory have cornered most of the scant research money available for red tide in recent years. Their scientists say there is no data linking agriculture and development runoff or industrial pollution to the worsening algal blooms off Florida's coast.
But that view is increasingly being challenged by independent scientists as well as environmentalists who say the culprit in the blooms is nutrient-rich water running off farms, lawns and pouring from industry.
The Florida Sierra Club this week voted to lobby at the state and federal levels for more money for red tide research, and for acceptance of the theory that runoff contributes to the blooms.
"The red tide research should focus on the role of nutrient pollution in fueling longer and bigger red tide blooms," said Frank Jackalone of the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club vote comes as the Environmental Protection Agency weighs a $4.7 million grant proposal from a team of institutions including Mote and led by FWRI. The money would be distributed over five years.
State and Mote researchers have spent years -- and millions of dollars -- collecting data, but still have few useful answers, said Jackalone.
Critics of the research have also pointed out that anyone blaming development, agriculture and industry for increased red tide blooms would be taking on the most powerful lobbies in the state.
Gil McRae, director of the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, has heard the criticisms before but says that the institute has the best staff to conduct red tide research.
FWRI is the research arm of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, conducting and analyzing research and engaging in public outreach.
McRae said that until recently, there was not enough money or the right technology to answer questions about land-based nutrients and the toxic blooms.
Without more research, he said, "There is no link between inshore nutrients and the severity or duration of red tides."
Kumar Mahadevan is president of Mote Marine in Sarasota, where researchers' work includes shark, sea turtle and marine mammal studies and aquaculture and fisheries enhancement research.
He said Mote has received money for its research from local, state and federal governments as well as from private donors.
Mahadevan said red tide is more complicated to study than cancer and gets a small fraction of the money for research that the disease gets.
"What we're saying, what the state is saying is that there is not enough of a tie with (land-based) nutrients," Mahadevan said. "We need to collect that data."
Not everyone agrees.
FWRI's critics say the link was considered long ago, and that current red tide research fails to build upon work a half century ago by researchers studying the bloom.
One of those was Bostwick Ketchum, a luminary in the field of ocean science and an early expert in ocean nutrients at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Ketchum studied what might be feeding the Florida red tide that followed record rains in 1947, and wrote that "the excessive nutrient content may be the result of terrigenous contamination or fertilization of the waters."
In other words, runoff.
Lawrence Slobodkin, another well known marine scientist, noted in 1953 that "the red tides may be coastal phenomena associated with heavy land drainage."
And last year, Larry Brand, a professor of Marine Science at the University of Miami who has analyzed 50 years of the state's red tide data, concluded that blooms are 10 to 15 times more intense and longer lasting than a half century ago.
More red tide needs more nutrients, and little is known to have changed in the Gulf over a half century except the human population that rings it.
The west coast of Florida, most affected by the blooms, has seen a 10- to 30-fold population increase in the past half century.
More people mean more runoff.
Looking for answers
The vote this week by leaders of the 35,000-member Florida Sierra Club is the latest disagreement in the growing tension between the environmental group and the state.
The Calusa Sierra Club in Collier and Lee counties has hosted discussions exploring the link between nutrient runoff and coastal red tide blooms.
The group also successfully lobbied Mote Marine to remove a sentence from its Web site that read: "The Florida red tides represent a natural process not caused by pollution."
And it successfully lobbied the Lee County Commission to fund its own red tide research with Brand.
More recently, the state Sierra Club opened an office in Sarasota to focus activism on algal blooms. Last week it hired Stuart Decew, a former aide to House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, R-Calif., to lead that effort.
The Florida Sierra Club also is critical of experiments with efforts to quell red tide blooms.
Scientists at Mote have tried spraying clay dust over the blooms. While clay sinks the bloom to the ocean bottom it does not kill the red tide algae, which critics say could harm bottom sea life.
Mote also is experimenting with spraying ozone into red tide blooms. The ozone destroys the algae and neutralizes its toxin, but it is also a dangerous substance for all marine life.
While scientists from Fish and Wildlife disagree with Brand's analysis, others acknowledge that a casual observer might note that the blooms appear to have worsened.
Lori Cloutier, chair of the Collier and Lee Sierra Club Calusa Group and the chief instigator of the Sierra Club action, said anyone near the beach with lungs knows it has.
"It's time the state did something besides shrug its shoulders," she said.
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