What lurks beneath the waves? Water in the Caloosahatchee is put to the test

FORT MYERS, Fla. – WINK News tested water quality at three locations along the Caloosahatchee to see what is lurking beneath the waves.

“Well it wasn’t pleasant because you were wondering, what’s in this?” Dino Halupa was visiting mid-October from Indiana. He didn’t spend every day of vacation at the beach, because of the brown water.

“We were told something was let loose, like form the everglades, or some fresh water,” he said.

On October 18 we tested the water from three sites: Franklin Lock, Punta Rassa and Fort Myers Beach pier.

The Results:

“It’s basically organic matter that is dissolved and that makes the water kind of brown looking. It’s not dangerous,” explained Dr. Serge Thomas, Assistant Professor for Environmental Studies at FGCU.

While the brown water present when we took samples did not register as dangerous, Dr. Thomas did find a higher nutrient content.

“Nitrogen actually jumped by 1.5 times,” he said.

That could mean more seaweed growth.

“We don’t want much seaweed here, especially the big brown seaweed, the red seaweed you see drifting… when they start decaying, they suck all the oxygen out of the water. So that can create fish kill,” he explained.

DOCUMENTS: See a PDF of the full water quality test results taken on 10/18

Back in July we tested the same three locations and Dr. Thomas said the results showed another elevated nutrient level: phosphorous.

He says too much of either can throw off the balance of our ecosystem because our ecosystem no longer has the ability to filter them out.

“In the past {the water} used to meandre and go through the grasses and be able to be filtered through the vegetation and sometimes be filtered down through the ground recharging the ground water. Now we have a lot of those impervious surfaces where the water doesn’t have time to infiltrate and just flushes down to the estuaries.”

Moving Forward

While our ecosystem has been changed by growth, Dr. Thomas says there are ways we can help filter the water ourselves and prevent as many nutrients from getting into the system.

“Everything you do upstream will eventually make it’s way downstream unless you filter that water,” he said. “So you have retention pond, which are an ecological filter; you have filter marshes; you have better practices with your septic tanks, you basically clean it often; you have good fertilization practices for your lawn, and um you can also plant the right plants like the native plants that don’t need a lot of fertilizer to grow.”

As far as when the brown water should clear, Dr. Thomas says as soon as the flow from lake Okeechobee stops, the water should eventually clear up. But we may have to wait until the weather warms up to see if we are in the clear when it comes to algae blooms or seaweed growth.