KEY WEST, Fla. – South Florida’s sawfish continue to die right before the very eyes of residents and visitors alike. On Tuesday, crowds gathered as a critically endangered smalltooth sawfish struggled in the shallows of Fort Zachary Taylor Beach in Key West.
“There’s nothing I could have done to you know, help it or drag it in,” witness Tim Friend said. “You kind of just sat there and just kind of like watched it.”
Friend and Ashley Furmanick were in the Keys visiting from Massachusetts when they came across what’s now become a painfully prevalent sight.
“It was kind of very sad to see him struggling, just struggling…it was heartbreaking,” Friend explained. “It seemed like several people on the beach were trying to, they wanted to go and grab it and put it back in the ocean… but the conservation (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) didn’t allow them to.”
This is now the 32nd smalltooth sawfish reported dead since January, the fourth one to die this week alone.
FWC confirmed to Local 10 News that the sawfish was a female, adding that the breakdown of mortalities has been pretty evenly split between males and females.
“In over 15 years, analyzing all the genetic fin clips of those juveniles (studied), there are less than 200 females that have contributed to those juveniles,” explained Adam Brame, the sawfish recoveries coordinator for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. “And so if we say, even half of the mortalities that we’re at at this point, are those mature females...that could be a pretty substantial proportion of those reproducing females.
“So it could have some serious implications for the population, and its ability to recover.”
On Monday, NOAA launched an unprecedented emergency response in partnership with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to try to rescue sawfish found in distress.
In Friend’s videos, FWC officers could be seen in the water trying to help the massive animal. Sadly, the animal did not survive.
According to FWC, this is now the 32nd smalltooth sawfish reported dead since January of this year.
This is in addition to more than one hundred witness accounts of others seen swimming erratically, beaching themselves, and thrashing about in shallow waters from the Atlantic, to Florida Bay in the Everglades and from Key West, now all the way north to the Boynton Beach inlet.
Lower Keys native Gregg Furstenwerth and his wife Shaylee have been documenting the parallel abnormal behavior of spinning fish in the nearshore waters of the Lower Keys since last year. To date, the couple has documented more than 70 species of impacted fish.
“There’s not one day that I go out that I do not see them spinning or in some way distressed,” Furstenwerth said.
On Easter Sunday, Furstenwerth witnessed a sawfish struggle on Boca Chica Beach.
“To see one like that, that was just that distressed was incredibly depressing to watch,” he reflected.
Now other species are turning up dead too.
A normal kayaking excursion for Big Pine Key native Sheila Bockoven, turned to horror on March 27, when she stumbled upon several dead fish in a mangrove-lined channel.
“We just ran across a good amount of dead sharks,” Bockoven can be heard saying in a video posted to YouTube.
Since October, researchers have been out resting and sampling the waters of the Lower Keys. The area is believed to be ground zero for the devastating event, but there’s still no smoking gun.
“We don’t really know… again this is something we have not documented before,” explained Michael Parsons, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Marine Science Water School. “We have not seen this.”
Parsons has been working side-by-side with FWC researchers to sample the water of the impacted region. So far, scientists have identified elevated levels of gambierdiscus, a benthic microalgae linked to ciguatera that lives on seaweeds on the bottom, but now also present in the water column.
“They were anywhere from five times higher to about 30 times above averages that we’ve seen over the past 10 years or so,” Parsons explained.
But are the levels of toxic gambierdiscus present high enough to cause this bizarre fish behavior?
Alison Robertson, senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and associate professor of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama is a marine toxicology expert and has been working with Parsons to solve this mystery.
Robertson doesn’t believe the data collected so far supports that.
“We’re not sure we can get to cause and effect yet,” says Roberston, “but we have detected those toxins in a number of the reef associated fish.”
“We know there’s gambierdiscus in this environment,” said Brian Lapointe, research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. “So it’s not really a surprise, but it’s unfortunate that we’re seeing this today.”
Lapointe has called the Lower Keys his part-time home since the late 1980s. Local 10 Anchor and Environmental Advocate Louis Aguirre joined him on Pine Channel to sample the proliferation of microalgae that he’s been documenting for more than four decades.
“It’s everywhere here, and what’s what gambierdiscus can live on,” Lapointe explained as he grabbed seaweed out of the water. “That’s the host organism in these waters.”
Lapointe says the problem is increasing nutrients in the water column, fueled by human waste and fertilizers. These nitrogen bombs have for decades spewed into the watershed, acting as rocket fuel for these blooms.
“This is runoff from our watershed,” Lapointe said. “Year-by-year as we get cumulative buildup of nutrients from wastewater, some of these nutrients are coming from the mainland… coming out of the Everglades.”
Until we stop these nutrients at the source, Lapointe fears that what’s happening now may set a dangerous precedent.
“We need to emphasize that if we ignore cleaning up our watershed going all the way north, then it’s going to just continue to get worse and worse,” Lapointe cautioned.
The Don’t Trash Our Treasure team reached out to the Florida Department of Health regarding potential human health issues related to this fish event. The agency responded in a statement:
“The Florida Department of Health (Department) continues to monitor the situation, and work hand-in-hand with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
To date, the Department has not seen an increase in reports of food borne illness.
The Department encourages residents and visitors to enjoy Florida’s waterways with caution and diligence, and further advises individuals who believe they have food-borne illness to seek medical attention immediately.”
-Jae Williams , Press Secretary for Florida Department of Health
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Report sightings of healthy, sick, injured or dead sawfish to FWC’s Sawfish Hotline. Include date, time and location of the encounter, estimated length, water depth and any other relevant details.
- 1-844-4SAWFISH (1-844-472-9347)
Report sightings of abnormal fish behavior, fish disease, or fish kills to FWC’s Fish Kill Hotline.
- Submit a fish kill report
- Call 800-636-0511