https://www.change.org/p/11632192/u/22098922?utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_update&utm_campaign=200356&sfmc_tk=JDqz%2fvQkRXpUIBAthewIQE9nUY47W2lFCpYB1gempVTzPChgBNhbMCVYPmxigkE4&j=200356&sfmc_sub=508889893&l=32_HTML&u=36987292&mid=7259882&jb=9

i went fishing in the banana river this past weekend. put in at the end of banana river drive and paddled a couple miles past kars. the water clarity the ENTIRE paddle was horrible . 1ft deep and couldn't even see the bottom. lots of mullet and lots of dolphin feeding on them. didn't see one tail the entire time. spooked a couple trout/reds and that was about it. anybody know of some semi clean water? i'm not looking for exact spots, just a general area.

Water was decent in south Mosquito when I was up there a couple of weeks ago.

Middle IRL in Cocoa/Rockledge/Suntree is terrible. Still have bioluminescence as of my paddle up to the bee line and back this morning. Color looks like a mix of brown tide and pyrodinium. Fishing isn't that bad here though for either species of drum. Can't sight them though.

Irma put a lot of nutrients in the water and there isn't any seagrass to use it so the plankton are prolific. Water won't clear until the plankton have worked through the available nutrients in the water column and that is only if our current dry spell persists. Hopefully we don't get a bloom collapse like in BRL in March 2016.

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Yea, I don't think camo is a good color for river water.

The flushing from the Irma bitch helped, but this dry period might set it off again.

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I was right.

Banana looked bloomy Saturday when I crossed the 520.

The water quality sensor that SJRWMD has up there is showing chlorophyll >200 micrograms per litre. That is very high.

For comparison. The south Mosquito Lagoon station has been <10 for most of the last month.

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http://webapub.sjrwmd.com/agws10/hdswq/

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The DO was low, but it looks like the gale force conditions have helped.

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I was right.

It will be interesting to see what the wind and sudden drop in temps do to the river water.

Hopefully, the temperature will stay above the snook threshold.

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I was right.

I know our poor jacksonville snook(the few up here) will have it tough but a few creeks are spring fed and believe that is how some survive. Im sure many will hunker down in the port or at the power plant, would be a shame as the stocks seem to be recovering well from the freeze 5-6 years ago that killed them all the way down to the everglades!

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I troll 2L.com to be a better person in real life

2010 was the last big chill.

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The extra runoff from Irma primed the pump. Now the increasing day length, steeper sun angle, and calmish mostly sunny weather is fueling the growth. 

The monitoring station at 520 on the Banana is showing chlorophyll over 300 ug/L and dissolved oxygen above 150% saturated today. 

This is tripping into March 2016 phytoplankton density.

IRL in Rockledge-Cocoa is looking pretty bad too as of my paddle from Rockledge to the BeeLine and back this morning.

I know in my neighborhood that people were laying down the fertilizer heavy in the couple of weeks before Irma. I assume lawn companies were doing that all over. Through in the out-dated waste water systems that dumped raw sewage as icing on the plankton cake. Hell, several of my neighbors have been watering 2-3 days a week right though the winter/dry season and adding straight nitrogen to keep some green going when lawns should be mostly dormant. 

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So what does it take to get some inlets or at the very least pumping stations to start exchanging water with the ocean? Pretty sure it's already too late to save the irl. With all the cold weather you would think we would have clear water, instead we have new blooms all the way up into mosquito lagoon. This is depressing.

Open the locks at Port Canaveral for 2 hours at every mid-high tide..........

I know too much salt water messes up the ecosystem but maybe a little would help flush the toilet that the IRL is becoming.

i have heard reports that the water conditions in vero/seb area aren't very good either.

We associate cold with clear around here because the cold historically corresponds with the dry season which is when the nutrient load is the least so the plankton aren't as abundant and the water clears up. 

Some plankton are slowed by cold. Some don't like short day length and low sun angles of winter. The pyrodinium that blooms in the summer here lately doesn't like cold water. But there are plankton around, especially the currrent brown tide, that don't mind cool conditions and short days at all. All they need is fertilizer.

Mathew didn't put much water down and then it was quite dry from after Mathew all the way until May or June. The lagoon got the clearest that I had seen it in a few years in March 2017 even though last February and March were very warm. 

Contrast that with winter 2015 with lots of winter rain and the bloom and bust that gave us the March 2016 BRL fish kill.

Also contrast the 16/17 winter following Mathew with the 17/18 post-Irma environment. 2017 was a wet wet season with Irma and another post-Irma rain event putting down tremendous rain. All that run-off carried a lot of nutrients into the lagoon with sewage spills as a cherry on top of a very big fertilizer cake. The plankton out there are still working through all that nitrogen.

Going to take a huge shift in landscape practices from water use to fertilizer application to make a dent. Our one little mimosa lawn isn't enough to mitigate the sea of St. Augustine around me. 

BTW: The mimosa went dormant and neighbors were horrified at the brownnesss in January. It woke up this week and is beautiful green. Pink puff flower and bees soon to come. I've not run water on it yet.

Oh, on the locks. Drop in the bucket and opening them regularly would wreck the structure due to erosion around the structure. Not enough bang for the buck. 

Last time I was down south it looked pretty bad down there too. 6000 cubic feet per second were dumped from the Stick Marsh down C54 for weeks after Irma on top of the runoff straight from the groves into Sebastian River on the south side of C54. There's a lot of grow juice in that ag waste water.

Fixing the nutrient load is the answer but is probably an insurmountable mountain.

 

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stupid question but dont oysters eat or filter some of the above "nuisance nutrients"?

I was surprised to see some last time I was at the seb river and remember hearing about programs to grow them but curious why that died down.

Are there factors that prohibit their existence present?

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I troll 2L.com to be a better person in real life

 

https://brevardzoo.org/wp-content/uploads/Oyster-Gardening-Data-Report-2016.pdf

 

https://www.flseagrant.org/news/2015/12/brevard-county-residents-help-restore-indian-river-lagoon-by-growing-oysters-from-their-docks/

 

I don't know what kind of efforts are ongoing. But trying to restore oysters to a point where oysters can filter the water is a thing. Oysters do eat the stuff that the nutrients grow and help remove that biomass and the nutrients it harbors from the water column.

 

Bad news is that the "brown tide" Aureoumbra lagunensis can kill juvenile shellfish when the concentrations get high enough.

 

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Looks like the dissolved oxygen crashed last week and the Chlorophyll is trending up, but the turbidity is staying low, so let's hope the current brown wave stays reasonable.

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I was right.

Chlorophyll is off the charts.

The diurnal swing in D.O. is insane as is the pH swing that causes as the plankton cycle the CO2 in and out of the water.

I haven't seen the BRL in a few days. 

I just came in from an interval sesssion on the IRL in Cocoa/Rockledge and the water looks like Lake Apopka on a bad day. Unreal.

pH goes screaming high during the day when all the CO2 gets pulled from the water and then plummets at night. I've seen carbonate precipitates in the water during the day because of the high pH. That makes light penetration pretty much zero. That is when the water gets that crazy bright milky yellow/brown/green look as the carbonate really scatters the light amoung the various plankton pigments.

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I hate to pick on the gardening forum since we have a lot of ornamental landscaping ourselves but:

And the gardening forum crowd are way more responsible with their landscape management than all of our mow-n-go chemlawn St. Augustine commercial landscape companies. (or my neighbors that fertilized their grass immediately after the cold snap and then watered every day for 2 weeks). 
"washed away" and the Aureoumbra lagunensis says thank you.

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