2304. Dredging of Miami Port Badly Damaged Coral Reef, Study Finds

By Lizette Alvarez, The New York Times, May 1, 2016 

Coral killed by sediments from dredging of Miami port.

MIAMI — The large-scale dredging of Miami’s port to accommodate the newest generation of freighters, an undertaking that prompted a long-running battle with environmentalists, caused widespread damage to a portion of the area’s fragile and already distressed coral reef, according to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The report, based on a December survey undertaken by scientists for the agency’s National Marine Fisheries Service, found that as much as 81 percent of the reef near the dredging site was buried in sediment, and an Army Corps of Engineers contractor report from August shows up to 93 percent partial coral death because of sediment, despite a plan by the Corps to minimize the damage.

The damage is particularly alarming because the world is rapidly losing its reefs, partly because of global warming, experts say.

South Florida has the only coral reef in the continental United States and 80 to 90 percent of it has died or been badly harmed over the years, officials say. The causes include ocean temperatures that have dipped too low or risen too high, acidification, sewage and pollution. Several cycles of white plague disease, including one in 2014 that coincided with the dredge, have also badly hurt South Florida’s reef. White plague, a virus that bleaches and kills coral, has been destroying reefs around the world.

“This Florida reef is as important to our country as the sequoias of California, and we are losing it faster than we can figure out why,” said Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, a nonprofit environmental organization that has sued the Army Corps of Engineers over coral damage. “There are a lot of stressors that are impacting and killing coral reefs, but this is a hyper-local example of something we could easily have prevented.”

The agency’s analysis, obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a December report by the corps, which primarily blamed white plague for the coral damage on reef sections near the dredge. In the corps’s report, scientists said that white plague was responsible for 85 percent of the coral deaths in the upper and middle parts of the reef and in the control site, and for 18.3 percent of the deaths of coral closer to shore. The report failed to highlight that 93 percent of the corals closer to the dredge had partially died because of sediment, compared with 7 percent at sites farther away, Ms. Silverstein said.

Scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disagreed with the corps’s emphasis on white plague disease. Rather, they concluded that the majority of the reef, stretching beyond 3,000 feet, showed conclusive damage to corals by dredging sediment.

The agency’s survey of the extensive damage comes at a time when Fort Lauderdale is seeking final congressional approval for the dredging of its own port, Port Everglades, one of the largest in the country. The dredging project to deepen the port cleared a crucial Senate committee last week as part of a larger water bill and is headed for the Senate floor. Coral reefs are critical to South Florida because they help lessen the damage from hurricanes, are important to marine biodiversity and lure tourists.

Environmentalists have warned Congress and the state that the corps’s plan to lessen the damage to corals in that area is flawed because it does not take into account new information, much of it bolstered by state and county scientists, about the extent of the coral damage from the port of Miami’s dredge. Expansion of Port Everglades is expected to begin next year.

The corps is still working on a final assessment of the Miami dredge’s effects on the coral, said Susan J. Jackson, a spokeswoman for the agency. Scientists will conduct dives this summer and then analyze their findings in the fall, she added.

“The results of the assessment will aid us in determining whether any additional mitigation may be needed,” she said. As for Port Everglades, Ms. Jackson said in an email that “lessons learned from all dredging projects are important, and we’re taking them into consideration during this process.”

Ms. Jackson added that the corps’s plan to protect the coral near Port Everglades was already an improvement over the Miami strategy. The new plan includes planting 103,000 new nursery-raised corals across 18 acres of reef and relocating existing coral to another five acres.

“We are confident in the extensive work we have done,” Ms. Jackson said.

But environmentalists said the plan failed to take into account how much farther than anticipated the sediment spread from the dredge site in Miami, a crucial element. The sediment suffocates coral. They want to see the impact zone extended beyond about 3,000 feet from the site. The Port Everglades plan also relies on a six-year-old survey of staghorn coral, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The vast majority of staghorn near the Miami dredge site was never relocated by the corps. Either it was missed in 2010 by contractors during the initial survey of the area, or the staghorn reproduced later. The corps ultimately agreed to rescue the remaining staghorn after a legal fight with Miami Waterkeeper and other groups.

It also relocated 924 nonendangered corals. In addition, underwater monitors to measure the sediment failed to work, so the corps relied solely on divers to keep tabs on the coral.

This time around, the Waterkeeper group is trying to set up independent monitoring of the coral before dredging begins to keep close track of possible damage.

“The corps like to say they learned a lot of lessons, and they promise they won’t do this again in Port Everglades,” Ms. Silverstein said. “We would like to see less aspirational talk and more mandatory language protecting these reefs.”

1808. Invasive Species: The Snake That’s Eating Florida

By Clyde Haberman, The New York Times, April 5, 2015

Burmese python consuming a deer it killed in Florida

Ever since a serpent enticed Eve to munch on that forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, relations between humans and snakes have been at best strained. But at least the gullible Eve and her mate had to cope with just the one snake. In South Florida, wildlife officials have struggled for years with tens of thousands of the creatures: specifically, a species known as the Burmese python, an interloper from Southeast Asia that has taken up what looks like permanent residence in Everglades National Park and other areas of the state.

This is some snake. At full maturity, a Burmese python routinely reaches lengths of 12 feet or more. Twenty-footers weighing 250 pounds are not unheard-of. The pythons are prodigious breeders, with voracious appetites to match. They are believed to have eaten their way through the Everglades, bringing about startling changes in the ecosystem. 

Some mammals native to those marshes, like foxes and rabbits, seem to have disappeared, researchers say. Other species — among them raccoons, deer, opossums and bobcats — are close to being wiped out. Pythons that migrated from the mainland to Key Largo have put indigenous wood rats in mortal peril.

Retro Report, a series of video documentaries exploring major news stories of the past, trains its lens on the dawning realization more than a dozen years ago that the Burmese python had the potential to alter Florida’s environment far more than people realized. But the issue is really greater than one breed of Asian snakes that ran wild after being imported into the country as pets. The United States is awash in invasive species exacting a heavy toll on native wildlife and vegetation. The list of intruders is long. To name but a few, they include Argentine tegus, large lizards that feast on sea turtle eggs; venomous lionfish from Asia, which prey on local varieties of fish; Nile monitor lizards from Africa, which love to eat frogs and crocodile eggs; zebra mussels from Russia, which harm waterways and damage water treatment plants; and Asian carp, which threaten the environmental balance of the Great Lakes.

Florida draws much of the attention because its swamps and tropical climate provide splendid shelter for all sorts of creatures that are not supposed to call this country home. The state, as more than one person has observed, is the Ellis Island of exotic species.

Like many animals previously unknown on the North American continent, the Burmese python arrived through the pet trade. (Language purists might reasonably ask if it is fair to describe these snakes as invasive. It is not as if they barged in on their own. People created the problem.) At least two million constrictor snakes — boas, anacondas and pythons — are believed to have been imported since the 1970s, part of a lucrative market for exotic species. Miami is an important hub for this trafficking.

One issue with Burmese pythons is that people cavalierly bought them when they were maybe a foot long. In short order, those little fellows grew to eight feet, 12 feet, 16 feet. Talk about buyer’s remorse. Unable to deal with these giants, owners often dumped them wherever seemed feasible. One way or another, snakes in South Florida found their way to the Everglades. There, they multiplied, again and again. Recent estimates by the National Park Service put the numbers there as high as 100,000. Walter E. Meshaka Jr. was the supervisory curator for national parks in southern Florida from 1995 to 2000. Even back then, Mr. Meshaka told Retro Report, the question was whether the python population would explode. And, he said, “Lo and behold, it did.”

Quite possibly, some experts in the field suggest, the local wildlife has been slow to appreciate the menace. “It’s probably a safe assumption that things like raccoons and possums probably don’t associate snakes with being something that really is a major threat to them,” Michael E. Dorcas, a herpetologist at Davidson College in North Carolina, said in a 2012 interview with Yale Environment 360, an online publication of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “Because,” Mr. Dorcas continued, “there really hasn’t been a snake big enough to eat a raccoon living in Florida for about 18 million years.”

While the python is more of a direct threat to native birds and animals than to people, attacks on humans are not unknown. One of the more horrifying instances occurred in 2009 when a 2-year-old girl in northern Florida was strangled by a Burmese python that belonged to her mother’s boyfriend. This eight-foot snake, which was later found to have been severely malnourished, broke free, coiled itself around the girl and squeezed her to death. Both the mother and the boyfriend were held responsible — convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The authorities in Florida have tried getting the unwelcome reptile population under control, but to little avail. A couple of years ago, they organized a Python Challenge, a come-one, come-all snake hunt on state land near Everglades National Park. It put barely a dent in the python population; no more than a few dozen of them were captured. Pythons have shown themselves to be masters of stealth. In a rather glum assessment, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service said in a statement last month that “scientists have not found any way of eradicating invasive constrictor snakes once they become established in the wild.” Some experts say the best hope to kill these creatures en masse may be a deep and prolonged freeze in southern Florida. Of course, everyone would then worry about the devastating effect on the state’s citrus crop.

Should other sections of the country start fretting about possible python incursions of their own? Yes, say some scientists who predict that, in coming decades, the invaders could slither their way across one-third of the United States — perhaps even reaching New York City by 2100. Other experts, however, wave off such fears as overblown.

The Obama administration has chosen to take a stand. Three years ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service banned imports and interstate transport of four species of constrictors: Burmese pythons, yellow anacondas and northern and southern African pythons. Last month, the prohibition was extended to four other species: reticulated pythons, DeSchauensee’s anacondas, green anacondas and Beni anacondas. (Boa constrictors, an important component of the pet snake trade, were spared a ban.) Not surprisingly, reptile sellers and breeders are not happy with the restrictions, with slippery slopesters among them warning that all kinds of animals, including more familiar household pets, could become the next government target.

Effective or not, the import bans are a recognition that some species labeled invaders were invited in by humans. It is a reality reminiscent of a famous line from no less than a swamp creature: the possum Pogo, whose name was the title of Walt Kelly’s long-running comic strip. Referring to unwelcome environmental change, Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”