Let’s take a trip!
Everybody climb aboard the time train, we’re heading back to the 80’s!
Ok, maybe not THAT deep…
In The 80’s
Crystal River was facing a relatively similar problem, with a different bad guy. Considered ‘Ground Zero’ for the invasive species Hydrilla, Crystal River was already over run and in need of cleanup. At the time, you could see the harvester out every week in an attempt to remove the overbearing Hydrilla and clean the water ways. Herbicide was also used in great force to kill off the over growth. This left dead plants falling to the canal and spring floors, left to decay.
Enter Mother Nature
It’s obvious the effect hurricanes have on land, but do you ever think about the effect these powerful storms cause under water? It became obvious that the repercussions of these storms have a significant impact on our aquatic vegetation beginning with Hurricane Elena in 1985. Elena, the No Name Storm of 1993, and many powerful storms following pushed massive amounts of saline water in to our bay. This suffocated basically all of the aquatic plant life in Crystal River, including the unwanted Hydrilla (Cause for celebration, right?). Not quite. This, as with the herbicide, left tons of decaying plants covering the waterway floors. The rotting plants then became anoxic, meaning they sucked up all the oxygen in the water, leaving it the perfect breeding ground to our current aggressor, Lyngbya.
Lyngbya
Once the path was clear it didn’t take long for the Lyngbya to take over. Thriving in the low oxygen conditions left from the hurricanes, this incredibly aggressive algae took its reign over Crystal River and King’s Bay. Whatever plant life remained was quickly smothered out leaving nothing but barren floors covered in ‘muck’, and globs of algae blanketing the once crystal clear waterways. It’s almost impressive how quickly this algae manages to cover large areas by attaching itself to aquatic life (i.e. fish, manatees, ect.), boats, or just floating along the current and spreading wherever it lands. As it spreads, the algae not only smothers any living vegetation but it also heads straight to any spring vents it can find. As we’ve learned already, Lyngbya LOVES low oxygen and the water that comes through the springs vents supplies the perfect environment for the algae to live and grow. This causes a huge problem in the springs, essentially cutting off it’s supply of fresh spring water.
A body of water can only live in two states
If you look back in time to the 80’s you see a shift from a plant based body of water with the invasive Hydrilla to now an algae based body of water with the native, but aggressive Lyngbya. The goal now is to shift BACK to plant based. Our removal process rids the water ways of the Lyngbya, but we can’t just walk away at that point. We need to make sure that our springs can sustain themselves as we move in to the future.
Rockstar to the rescue
Our contractor Sea and Shoreline not only remove the Lyngbya (which is actually a really cool process), but also take time and care to grow the native Rockstar Eelgrass, plant it, install cages to protect the grass to ensure it is properly rooted, and maintain the cages by cleaning and repairing them until they are safe to be removed. To be fair, some plants will be uprooted. It’s kind of inevitable if you consider that our floating friends the manatee LOVE munching the grass (Sometimes pulling the entire plant out), the number of boats anchoring every day (tips to avoid damaging the eelgrass beds), and guests and residents accidentally pulling them up (Try not to shuffle your feet, floating is more fun anyway). The good news though, if the roots are in tact, most of those floating plants will wander down the river and find a new spot to call home. We’ve actually gotten reports of our Rockstar Eelgrass growing in areas we haven’t touched!!
What can we learn from the past?
We like to thinkthat most of the mistakes we have made in the past are due to simple ignorance. At the time, the use of herbicide was the perfect solution. Now we know that it is not. When the hurricanes came through and killed the invasive Hydrilla it must have seemed like mother nature fixing the problem. Now we know it just replaced one with another. We have a great opportunity not not only learn from the past, but to reverse the effect.
