March 2025

When it comes to monitoring the condition and health of the environment surrounding us in Florida the best advice is often to listen out for the signals Nature tends to send when things are going awry. One of these signals was highlighted in reports published by the South Florida Water Management District, with news breaking that the number of wading birds across the Everglades over the last two seasons had dropped below the 10-year average. 

Rainfall – or the lack of it – played its part, this caused shallow conditions in large swathes of the Everglades in the nesting season, leaving nesting wading birds with too few fish to support them and their chicks. However that’s not the whole story. In addition to drought conditions, scientists pointed out that flood control measures had played a large part in nesting areas being over-drained. 

The ongoing $23 billion Everglades restoration project is designed, in part, to reverse the damage caused by flood controls of this kind. It’s a complicated and intricate balancing act, the changing environment and other factors, like rising sea levels has had impacts such as altering the types of wading birds spotted in the Everglades, shifting the nesting season of bird-like wood storks, and the rising sea levels have driven roseate spoonbills from Florida Bay to the Gulf Coast and central Everglades.

Ask most people to picture the average volunteer conservationist, and the chances are that what they won’t come up with is someone like Steve "Gonzo" Gonzalez. That’s because Steve, who works as events director for a nonprofit called Force Blue, is an ex-Navy SEAL who retired after 34 years in the forces and now uses his underwater expertise to work on ocean conservation work such as coral reef restoration. 

Force Blue is run mainly by and for veteran volunteers and is undoubtedly a ‘win-win’ scenario, in that it provides expertise and hands on brute force for projects such as building a living shoreline in Choctawhatchee Bay, on the Florida panhandle, at the same time as providing ‘mission therapy’ to veterans seeking the sense of purpose and camaraderie they once gained from serving in the military. 

As Angelo Fiore, who directs operations for Force Blue points out, the Force Blue initiative takes what he calls ‘the best trained divers in the world’ and uses their skills for increasingly vital tasks such as marine debris cleanup, coral restoration and shoreline defense systems.

The  next time you’re tasked with getting rid of the kitchen waste – those egg shells, that banana peel, the coffee grinds – ask yourself if you couldn’t do something more useful than just letting it rot away. It's fairly common these days to make compost for your own yard, but this story takes composting to a whole new level. It involves the village of Pinecrest, Miami-Dade, which has launched a pilot project under which kitchen waste is turned into nutrient rich compost which is then delivered to the Miccosukee Tribe in the Everglades.

The project, called the “Everglades Earth Cycle” is the first large-scale compost program in the county sponsored by a local government, and initially the compost will be used to grow a community garden. Over the course of the first year 90,000 pounds of food waste were collected, and the three current drop off points are set to be expanded to nine. The benefits of the scheme include less garbage heading to Miami-Dade landfills which are already close to capacity and a reduction in the methane emissions usually created by rotting food. 

Over the longer term, it’s hoped that this pilot project could help to protect the Everglades from water pollution caused by fertilizer run-off.

Here in the H2O Zone we’re always keen to highlight stories showing how scientific advances can be used to help protect the environment, and this is one of the more entertaining examples.

A robot sea cow, aptly named Mechanatee, is being developed by three Florida Tech students, and the aim is that the fully developed device will help to gather information on the lives of manatees, by looking and acting like a manatee but all the while silently gathering data on the hitherto unknown lives of these gentle creatures. 

Propelling itself with a tail rather than disruptive propellers – just like the real thing – the mechanatee is on course to be completed in a few years, and one of the main missions of the tech is to help scientists decipher the clicks, cucks and chirps that manatees use to communicate with each other. The scientists are using machine learning to ‘teach’ the manatee language to the robot in the hope that, in the future, it will be able to communicate with the underwater creatures under its own steam.

In layman’s terms, cyanobacteria are often referred to as blue green algae and they are a natural phenomenon of particular interest to anyone managing, maintaining or installing a large-scale irrigation system.

In scientific terms, cyanobacteria are a fascinating phenomenon, representing one of the oldest organisms on the planet, with fossil remains having been found which date back 3.5 billion years.

They've played a key role in the evolution of life on earth since they deliver oxygen into the atmosphere via the process of photosynthesis. For anyone involved in irrigation, however, this is of less importance than the fact that the individual cyanobacteria join and weave together to form huge blooms, creating the blue green slime often visible in bodies of freshwater like irrigation lakes, or along the seashore.

Until a UK university study a couple of years ago, the process by which millions of individual units join together to form sometimes vast blooms capable of choking the life out of water was a mystery. However, what wasn’t a mystery was the danger presented by such large blooms, particularly since five types of cyanobacteria have been identified as toxin producers. Among these are hepatoxins, which damage the liver, neurotoxins, which attack the nervous system and dermatoxins which affect the skin. 

Because of the danger of the toxins in these cyanobacteria, the blooms are known as Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), and in this article we take a closer look at what they are, and why they happen. 

We’ve written about the threat posed by red tide blooms along the Gulf Coast in the past, and this story brings us once again to the topic, but hopefully new research holds a more positive twist. 

The twist is that researchers at the University of South Florida have, for the very first time, identified viruses present in the red tide blooms. Several viruses, including a totally new species, have been found in red tide and learning more about them may, over time, enable scientists to predict when red tide blooms are likely to appear. They may even help to reduce the threat that such blooms present. 

Further study of the viruses will help to determine the biological causes of red tide, which kills fish and other marine life and can cause respiratory issues for people close to the beaches in question. The hope is that, with further study, an understanding of the viruses will enable scientists to develop means of dealing with the blooms which cause less harm to the wider environment than current chemical and biological approaches.