My brother Todd took a family fishing expedition on Saturday, June 28, 2020. 119 miles! His journey may not have revealed many fish out in the deep ocean, but there was tremendous visible life in the Indian River Lagoon and nearshore ocean. Good to see!
“Beautiful flat day. 119 miles and only a barracuda, but it was fun.
Saw hundreds of Pelicans diving on the silver minnows near the power plant. That is probably to most Pelicans I have ever seen in one place locally, including bird island.
Also in all my life I have never seen the fin of a shark at the sandbar. After looking at my photos, I am pretty sure is was a little Scalloped Hammerhead. I cropped a comparison from the online guide and a link to the entire guide. I couldn’t see the head but the fins seem to match. The few people who saw it thought it was a Bull Shark but I didn’t think so. A Bull Shark fin isn’t as sharp.”
Below are photos of the hundreds of happy brown pelicans and also photos of the juvenile scalloped hammerhead shark. Don’t be scared! It’s just a young shark. The estuaries are their home. These and all sharks are protected species and many like the scalloped hammerhead, globally endangered due to overfishing. Mostly for shark fin soup! Awful.
Well, there’s nothing like a day on the water! Fish or no fish. 119 miles is never for nothing around here!
John Whitcar, of the famed local Whiticar Boat Works family, has been a longtime family friend, and I have featured his incredible photography before. Today’s shared photos were taken on March 5th.
He describes today’s photos below:
House of Refuge Huge Waves Monday, March 5, 2018 / Stuart Florida, USA 11 ft. waves coming in from North Easter off of New England. Very little wind / High Tide / ~11:00 am
The story of the House of Refuge is an amazing one, being the last of its kind, Old-Florida pine construction, having endured multiple hurricanes and other forces of time and nature, and still standing since 1876.
“US government houses of refuge were constructed to assist shipwreck survivors and were unique to the east coast of Florida. Ten were constructed between 1876 and 1886, but only but Martin County’s Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge survives.” ~Historian Sandra Thurlow
The moral of the story?
Build your house upon a rock. ~Including the Anastasia Formation, preferably.
A large dead 7 foot male dolphin held by Dolphin Ecology Project volunteer along the banks of the St Lucie River, 2012. (Photo Nic Mader)
Right now there are two “Unusual Mortality Events/UMEs” occurring in the Indian River Lagoon and another along the Atlantic Coast. Hundreds of marine mammals and pelicans have died but fortunately the IRL UMEs have slowed down.
The UME for Indian River Lagoon manatees “and pelicans” started in 2012; another for Indian River Lagoon bottle-nosed dolphins that do not usually leave the lagoon began in 2013; and the third for larger Atlantic coast dwelling/migrating bottle-nosed dolphins stated around 2012/13. According to state and federal agencies, the Indian River Lagoon UMEs are “mysterious,” but thankfully “they” can say they know the Atlantic dolphin UME is “morbillavirus,” or dolphin measles.
Interesting how in the Indian River Lagoon, the UMEs coincide with the also “mysterious” loss of 60% of its seagrasses since 2009/10; this situation really “crashed” and became public in 2013, simultaneous with the dumping from Lake Okeechobee and the peoples’ River Movement in Martin and St Lucie Counties in the southern lagoon.
For every day folk, unlike our federal and state agencies, there is no “mystery,” there simply is not enough left for the animals to eat. While being so critical, I should note a commonly spread falsehood, “that the releases from Lake Okeechobee are causing the die off in the northern/central lagoon,” is untrue. Certainly they negativelyaffect and help cause disease in the souther lagoon, but Brevard and Volusia counties, over a hundred miles north, are too distant for the releases to be killing these animals directly. Particularly northern lagoon dolphins who are very territorial and generally stay in either the north.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the southern lagoon right now, especially the Ft Pierce area, is one of the few half-way healthy areas remaining, so dumping that is pushed up to Ft Pierce Inlet, from Stuart, is part of an overall death for the IRL: north and central horrid algae blooms and UMEs, and then the southern lagoon’s problems with Lake Okeechobee releases and its other canals causing seagrass loss, up to 85% according to Florida Oceanographic’s Mark Perry.
So UMEs in the IRL and seagrass loss are related and the agencies recognize this connection but still consider the UMEs a “mystery.”
To close, one of the concerns of Stephen McCulloch, former director of the marine mammal department at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, is that southwardly migrating dolphins along the Atlantic coast could enter the Indian River Lagoon, or a rare lagoon dolphin may exit an inlet and interact with oceanic dolphins then spreading morbillavirus among the already “mysteriously sick” Indian River Lagoon dolphins.
McCulloch is concerned if the virus entered the lagoon, it could “kill them all.”
There were fewer than one thousand in the lagoon loosely documented before the 2013 IRL dolphin UME and now it is accepted that over 10 percent of those have died. This, as all marine mammal health, is a very serious matter.
