Various dead fish blanket the surface near a St. Petersburg seawall in July.

“A lot of beautiful, big goliath grouper came up dead in Tampa Bay,” reported Frank Sargeant, FS Projects Editor and Outdoors Editor for the Tampa Tribune. “I estimate we lost close to a hundred of them, big fish in the 200- to 300-pound range. These were probably fish that had been in there since the 1989 closure, getting bigger every year.”

Jennifer Schull, a fishery biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, confirmed that the goliath grouper mortalities were red tide related. The volume of corpses (25 as of August) retrieved from the Tampa Bay area provided a tragic windfall to scientific research; working at the NMFS Southeast Fisheries Center in Miami, Schull logged measurements of otoliths (ear stones), dorsal spines and other features, trying to find a relationship between age and spines.

Along Bay-area shores, the odor of rotting grouper and other fish could be smelled a mile away, said Sargeant. “The nastiest smelling thing I’ve ever been in,” he said, noting that this year’s red tide was the worst he could recall in nearly 40 years on the Florida waterfront.

Jeremy Lake, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, said by late summer, there had been 58 manatee deaths attributed to red tides; scientists were still performing necropsies. This year scientists released a report documenting how red tide toxins were responsible for fatalities of manatees in 2002, and bottlenose dolphins in 2004. The scientists, reporting in Nature, found that manatees may be poisoned after munching on red tide cells adhering to seagrass blades. The 107 dolphins killed in the Florida Panhandle in the spring of ’04 had consumed small fish that had accumulated red tide toxins. The toxin, a nerve poison, is released into the water and air when colonies of the single-cell Karenia brevis dinoflagellate break down. The colonies develop offshore over the continental shelf and travel at the mercy of wind and tide. What triggers their growth is, as one expert put it, “the $64,000 question.”

The list of fish killed in the summer of 2005 included “virtually every type of fish known to our coast,” said Capt. Gary Folden of Largo. “Trout and white grunts really seemed to take it on the chin,” he said.

Tarpon, redfish, snook, stingrays, catfish, herrings and more were reported.

“At times we had huge areas of floating fish, like you’d see weedlines in the ocean,” said Capt. Ray Markham of Terra Ceia.

Both guides reported serious losses in the chartering business. Red tides were reported as early as January 2005, but the worst of it was probably June, July and August, said Markham.

Spotted seatrout were hard-hit by the red tide in Tampa Bay.

Wes Hempstead, who resides in Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast, was working a dredge in the Sarasota Bay area for much of the summer. “It’s nothing like what we’ve had on the east coast,” he said. “It’s more visual—kind of like a pinpoint orange thing in the water.” Increased turbidity and the arrival of “little strings of colonies” signaled another wave of red tide, followed by fish kills and human respiratory troubles. “We experienced a lot of coughing and headaches in the base of the neck,” he said.

Perhaps most insidious was a 20-mile wide “dead zone” off Pinellas County. Here divers found stone crabs, starfish, clams and other bottom-dwelling critters smothered by a complete lack of dissolved oxygen, related to the decomposition of organisms killed by red tide toxins. Dozens of dead sea turtles washed ashore along Clearwater Beach.

“Is this a crisis?” asked Gary Appelson of the sea turtle advocacy group Caribbean Conservation Corps. “You bet it is.”

Dr. Richard Pierce, director of the private Mote Marine Center for Ecotoxicology in Sarasota, agreed that this summer was a bad one for red tide, but he felt it was “nowhere near the longest or most extreme.” He cited an 18-month red tide in 1994, which killed a number of manatees in Charlotte Harbor and affected fishes from Tarpon Springs to the Florida Keys. The mid ’80s saw another severe event, wherein a red tide bloom actually drifted around the tip of Florida, eventually decimating the shellfish industry in North Carolina. Another serious red tide occured in 1971, and of course in the 1940s, when the red tide dinoflagellate was first identified. (Historical records reveal red tides since the late 1880s, and isolated events predating European colonization of Florida).