MARATHON, Fla. – After a nine-month lull, new accounts of spinning fish and dead sawfish are being documented in the Florida Keys.
There have been at least 22 reports of sawfish seen in distress and acting erratically, with some found dead, but does that mean a repeat of what happened last year?
Keys boat captain Hope Brummitt was heartbroken by the sight.
“I noticed something flopping in the water, and it ended up being a stingray,” she said. “He was upside down, spinning around. I did try to take my paddle and help flip him over, and he flipped right back. He looked like he was in a lot of distress.”
Brummitt is one of several Florida Keys residents taking to social media to post new videos of fish once again spinning and acting bizarrely in the lower keys, an eerie reminder of last year’s devastating event that affected 80 different species of fish and saw the reported deaths of 56 critically endangered smalltooth sawfish.
For Brummitt, it’s Deja vu.
“Now I’m once again seeing this spinning fish disease,” she said. “So, it’s concerning.”
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has confirmed that so far this year there have been six reported deaths of smalltooth sawfish, once again found in the lower keys, all of them in February.
“We, of course, are concerned, because sawfish are protected species, but it is nowhere near the magnitude that we saw last year in terms of the total number of spinning fish reports and the number of sawfish that were either swimming erratically or recovered dead,” said Gil McCrae, Director of the FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.
This time last year, there were already 22 documented sawfish deaths along with dozens of reports and videos of stressed-out sawfish beaching themselves and thrashing about, with some dying right before the eyes of helpless onlookers.
But wildlife officials don’t yet believe we’re experiencing the same event again this year. There have been way fewer sightings of sawfish in distress and the FWC has executed a new response plan that may account for the numbers we’re seeing so far.
“We have a much more active reporting network with many more partners involved,” said McCrae. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers that we’re seeing this year in part are due to the enhanced reporting that we have in place.”
As a matter of fact, last November Local 10′s Don’t Trash Our Treasure crew was given exclusive access to the FWC research field lab in Marathon, where reinforcements were already beefed up and at the ready.
“We are totally taken off guard last year by the magnitude and the breadth of this, and this year we’ve got a team put together, and we’re ready to respond,” said Thomas Matthews, FWC Program Administrator and Director of the FWC South Florida Regional Lab in Marathon.
Since the event sparked last winter, continuous water sampling has been ongoing to try and solve the mystery. All signs pointed to an alarming overabundance of gambierdiscus in the water column, a benthic toxic microalgae that exploded in numbers never seen before.
Scientists say that’s not the case this year.
“Gambier discus numbers are very low,” Michael Parsons, an algal bloom expert who leads a research team from Florida Gulf Coast University, said. “They’re basically at baseline, whereas this time last year, we definitely saw big elevations, so we’re not seeing that this year so far. We are sampling on a fairly regular basis. We’ve been going down every month now, basically since October.”
Parsons and his team have been collaborating with FWC and local fishing guides to try pin point what’s causing this.
So far, there is no smoking gun and it’s still way too early to confirm that we’re in for another devastating repeat.
“I think it’s cause for concern, but not alarm,” said Parsons.
Added McCrae: “We have a protocol and teams in place now to get the freshest tissue we can from them, those dead sawfish, and that’s really the key to figuring out why they’re affected more than any other species.”
The FWC said it is once again working with partners like the Mote Marine Laboratory and NOAA to respond to and rescue sawfish seen in distress, however, McCrae says the protocol moving forward will be to try and treat the sawfish on site and try and stabilize it as opposed to transporting it to a facility where those efforts did not work last year.
The public needs to stay vigilant and report straight away any spinning fish or sawfish seen in distress.
For more information on how to report sightings, click here.