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Sarasota News Leader February 22, 2013 Page 111 where they hatch and instantly start munching are washed onto the Gulf beaches along with on plankton and filtering. the dead fish and never get a chance to enter our Bay, hatch and start filtering. Over the past couple of decades it has become routine for some ���environmental activists��� to THE HISTORICAL RECORD assign responsibility for any form of ecocide to human bad practices. Man cannot claim Current research on red tide reaches into the credit for red tide, but he may be responsible past to retrieve descriptions and establish for aiding or abetting it. I would even say mol- patterns. Beginning more than 350 years ago, records written by European New World exlycoddling it! plorers and settlers described massive ���fish What worries scientists is the fact that when kills��� along the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. red tide finally does reach our shores and The earliest account of red tide is incorrectinland waterways, monitoring studies show ly attributed to ��lvar N����ez Cabeza de Vaca, that it is intensifying and lingering longer than a Spanish explorer shipwrecked in 1527 in normal. This suggests that man-made coast- the Tampa Bay area. He spent eight years as al runoff and pollutants are exacerbating and a slave of, and a trade emissary to, various prolonging the bloom. Let us examine this on American Indian tribes. In 1536, he was reunita very small scale. ed with Spanish colonial authorities in MexSome 30 years ago, a few rich and influential ico. Cabeza de Vaca���s written account of fish homeowners on south Siesta Key caused Mid- kills in the Gulf was within the context of his night Pass to be closed. Dolphins and mana- admiration of an Indian tribe with no lunar or tees could no longer transit between the Gulf solar calendar and which, therefore, divided and the bay and currents stopped flowing be- the seasons according to the position of the stars, the ripening of berries and the fish kills tween the bay and Gulf. brought about by the annual cold front. As a result, the ecology of Little Sarasota Bay changed dramatically. The bay began to mim- The fish kills recorded by Cabeza de Vaca had ic the characteristics of a pond and silted up. nothing to do with red tide because red tide Once-familiar species of fish left its waters, is not an annually occurring event. If it were, as did the flocks of egrets and herons that ate scientists would be able to forewarn people: ���Expect red tide at 9:17 a.m. on Jan. 22 on them. Turtle Beach!��� And everyone could get to the Simply put, man���s poorly considered inter- beach and bury their heads in the sand before vention in the natural order of things compro- the dead fish washed ashore! mised the bay���s immune system. When rain washes herbicides and fertilizers into the bay, Why mention Cabeza de Vaca if he was not the there is no flow into the Gulf that would dissi- first to have documented red tide? Because he pate and eventually eradicate them. Bacteria is the first one credited with a report of natuthat might have latched onto the red tide flag- ral fish kills in our Gulf and it is important to ellates are trapped in the bay, or perhaps they know that these events are the consequence had even been eradicated; and menhaden roe of annual temperature fluctuations, not red