Looking back Looking forward

This is my post for #lookingbacklookingforward hosted by @wakeupkitty

Looking back at the Indian River Lagoon I am not surprised as to why the entire ecosystem in it crashed, killing thousands of fish, wildlife, manatees, dolphins, and mullet grass. The Indian River Lagoon is supposed to be a brackish water lagoon. There was more freshwater than saltwater.

Before my time they dug an inlet to have a way to the Atlantic Ocean, which lets more saltwater to come into the river. We had lots of mangrove marshes which were nursery areas for juvenile fish to grow up, but the State came in and closed them off by building a dike around them to make mosquito impoundments to control the breeding of mosquitos, they spray poison in them. Then at times, they open them up to drain and all that goes into the river.

We had three large coves that had rocks on the bottom, this made a place for small fish to hide, the State filled them in to build a road.

The Sebastian River flowed freshwater into the Indian River Lagoon. This part comes down to politics. It is my believe that the developers needed freshwater so they could have water to treat and run to their housing developments. The way the State got public opinion on their side to stop the freshwater from flowing into the IRL is they held it back and when the river water was hot and salty they dumped it all at once which created algae blooms, and they convinced the public by getting it on the news that the freshwater is bad for the river, when in reality if they would let it come out naturally there would be no algae blooms. We tried to tell them this but they did not want to listen to us. The shame of it is if you ask anyone that does not make their living on the water they will tell you the problem with the river is too much freshwater.

These algae blooms have just about killed all the mullet grass in the IRL. Mullet grass is a long thin blade of seagrass which small fish can hide in and it is also what manatees eat. When it died off the manatees started eating what we call rolling grass, it is not really a grass it is an alga when the manatees started dying they did a necropsy on them and found the rolling grass was not being digested and created a blockage in their intestines and they starved to death.

Today there are small areas that mullet grass is trying to come back but somehow a new type of grass is taking over the mullet grasses area and killing off the mullet grass. It is very short grass, not a good place for small fish to hide.

Looking forward, I do not think there is much to look forward to where the river is concerned, What this State has done to it is nothing less than criminal.

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