[Coral-List] What happened in 1983

[Eugene Shinn]

      MY rant regarding, "gizmos and follow the money" Vol 176 Issue 13, 
was mainly focused on the Florida Keys reef situation. Before retiring 
from the USGS my team had installed around 100 water monitoring wells in 
the Florida Keys both on land and offshore. The average depth of these 
wells was 35 ft with a few up to 60 ft deep. The work was funded by both 
the State and the US EPA. The results are published in a USGS special 
publication widely disseminated  among key's citizens and Monroe County 
State and local agencies. From water analyses and abundant observations 
the main conclusions included: 1. sewage nutrients and other 
contaminates reside in upper most 20 ft of fresh and saline ground water 
under the Florida Keys. 2. Because of tidal pumping net horizontal flow 
of that water through the highly porous and permeable Keys limestone is 
toward the coral reefs on the Atlantic side of the Keys. Movement is on 
the order of 6 ft per day. 3. Movement is away from the Florida Bay side 
of the Keys because water level there is on average around 1 foot higher 
than sea level on the Atlantic side. Flow occurs mainly during low tides 
on the Atlantic side of the Keys where the difference in water level is 
often on the order of 3 ft.  It is well known that Keys sewage nutrients 
are in fresh water from toilets etc.  Fresh water also floats back to 
the surface when injected 50-100 ft into disposal wells that reach down 
into the underlying salt water. At the time of our study there were some 
30,000 septic tanks and several dozen sewage package plants and 
injection wells. I do not know the numbers today. The good news is there 
are pending law suits and ongoing discussions about extending disposal 
wells down to more than 2,000 ft such as those in Dade County at the 
Black Point disposal well field near southern Biscayne Bay. Drilling of 
deep and expensive disposals wells in Monroe county may be months or 
years away. One can conclude most pollutants in the Florida Keys come 
mainly from the Keys regardless of how they enter the ground water. What 
is true for the keys probably does not apply in the broader Caribbean.

      It would be quite a stretch to blame sewage nutrients for coral 
diseases around all the small islands in the eastern Caribbean. During 
the 1980's I attended several of the annual seminars conducted at the 
Marine research facility on San Salvador Island. During an early visit 
our group was taken to a beautiful /Acropora cervicornis/ reef in 
shallow water a short distance off the highway that runs along the west 
side of the Island. It was known as,Telephone Pole Reef. A  dive resort 
devoted to underwater photographers had been established nearby. Later 
when Phil Dustan and I visited the lab and nearby telephone pole reef in 
1983 it was totally dead, The branching corals were not broken, they 
were still in growth position. It was clearly caused by disease. At the 
same time I was taking serial photographs of this species as it was 
dying in growth position at Grecian Rocks Reef off Key Largo in the 
Florida Keys.

      Don Gerace, who had created and managed the San Salvadore lab (it 
was a former Naval Facility) told me the reef had died during a period 
of about 2 months causing the nearby dive resort to close. I might also 
mention that in addition to /A. cervicornis, A. Palmata/ around the 
island was also dead. The same rapid death of coral  also occurred at 
nearby Rum Cay. Both islands are situated in the Atlantic well east of 
the main Bahama banks and are surrounded by deep blue very clear oceanic 
water. All of this occurred before establishment of the Club Med on San 
Salvador and the population on Rum Key where there are no towns and has 
a population many times less than San Salvador. Residents researchers at 
the San Salvador lab had detected no change in water temperature.  I 
might also mention all of this was happening in 1983, while the Sea 
Urchin /Diadema/ was perishing throughout the Caribbean and the Florida 
Keys. There was also a disease affecting the common sea fans that was 
not yet known to the public. Many of you know there was something else 
happening in1983 so I don't have to say it again. I will however, 
mention that on a later visit to San Salvador I met an archeologist who 
was finding red clay pottery shards in the thin red soil locals call 
Pineapple loam. The pottery and the Pineapple loam was present when 
Columbus landed on this limestone island in 1492. Gene