Florida's Beautiful but Inhospitable Springs
Florida has more coastline than any of the other lower 48 states in the U.S. But while salt water lines Florida's beaches, the state also has immense deposits of freshwater. Some of its freshwater springs, once teeming with eel grass and other underwater vegetation, are now overrun with algae. While the algae create a picturesque green scene, the tiny organisms are stifling diversity of life in the springs. At Manatee Springs, manatees no longer have the resources necessary to make the spring their home.
This video was collected during the 2015
Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition, a thousand-mile journey from central Florida to Alabama to help protect the corridor "for the health of people, wildlife, and watersheds."
Originally published March 6, 2015Click to read NG Travel's tips for exploring Florida by land and sea.More videos from the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition:
Inside a Third-Generation Oysterman’s Tough TradeFrog-Licking and Other Florida Wonders
Mallory Dimmitt
Executive Director
Florida Wildlife Corridor
[00:03] The light is just peering in these shafts and it's really kind of otherworldly seeing these long strings of green algae with the light on them kind of dancing in the water.
When I'm sitting out on the water you did see a manatee swim up into Manatee Springs, which seems very fitting. The manatees are working their way here but there's nothing for them to eat.
Mark Long
Cave Diver / Naturalist
[00:27] I've been camping here since I was six or seven years old with my parents so I have a real history with this place, it's always been one of my favorite caves. A lot of this stuff has happened over the past twenty years. Our springs have declined in flow, some are not as clear as they once were, sub-aquatic vegetation, eel grass, these sort of native type species virtually disappeared in many of these springs and they've been taken over with this filamentous algae that's pretty much everywhere in the basins of these springs nowadays.
Annette Long
Cave Diver / Naturalist
[01:05] This filamentous algae is gooey, it's glassy, it's not good to eat. Mullet eat it so there's one or two things, snails eat it, but something has happened to the water quality that's killing the snails. So the lack of the animals that graze the filamentous algae and the high nitrates that cause it to grow explosively are why the imbalance is there.
Mark Long
[01:34] What's on the radar these days is nitrates, and they come from fertilizer, human waste, and animal waste. Our springs, the background level is pretty much considered .10, is a background level of nitrates. And for years that's what all this ground water around here was.
As some of these large farms come into these spring basins these nitrate levels quickly started spiking up and .35 is the point that scientists consider spring water or ground water impaired. Now the spring we're going to be diving at today is 1.2, 1.3 milligrams pretty much constantly, so that's several times the normal background and three to four times what's considered impaired.
Annette Long
[02:22] People come here and look at this, we come here and we cry because it changed so much, it's still beautiful. With the clear blue water and the bright green algae, it's still a beautiful beautiful place to come.
