Dec 14, 20197 min read

Reviving Florida’s Indian River Lagoon: Brevard Zoo’s Improbable Restore Our Shores Program

Fig. 1 - The shoreline of the Indian River Lagoon.

Virtually anyone who has visited Florida’s East Coast is at least passingly familiar with the Indian River Lagoon. A beautiful subtropical segment of the unfathomably immense Intracoastal Waterway (which stretches from New England to Florida), visitors can’t even access the state’s famous eastern beaches without traversing one of the colossal causeway bridges that transect it. The most biologically diverse estuarine environment in the nation, the IRL’s brackish water manifests as a tranquil coalescence between the state’s outflowing spring-fed river systems and the thundering waves of the Atlantic Ocean. As a Florida native, I fondly remember making trips to the lagoon with my family, buzzing our modest fishing boat across its surface, encountering jellyfish, horseshoe crabs, and dolphins, and splashing around in the remarkably transparent tannin-hued waters. A colloquial chat with virtually any of the region’s diverse locals elicits a similarly winsome anecdote.

The times have certainly changed. Today, massive fish die-offs and water quality complaints plague the communities adjacent to the lagoon, and the water visibility has been

Restore Our Shores Staff placing mangrove propagules in the Indian River Lagoon. — Fig. 2 - Jake Zehnder, ROS staff, in the lagoon placing mangrove propagules.

reduced to mere inches on the best of days. The frequent subject of proletarian jeremiads and state government torpidity, “Save the Lagoon” has become a rallying cry for most of Florida’s coastal residents. Concern for the system’s ongoing degradation has drawn national attention; prominent periodicals like the New York Times have covered unexplained dolphin, manatee, and pelican deaths en masse that appear to insinuate an environment on the brink of collapse. Local and state governments have made concerted efforts to control fertilizer runoff, industrial effluent, and other sources of pollution, but the resulting improvements have been incremental at best and the damage has proven difficult to remediate through post hoc regulatory efforts alone.

Enter the Brevard Zoo. A part of the Brevard County community since 1994, the non-profit establishment has been steeped in volunteer leadership and participation since its inception and is widely recognized for its active role in local conservation. Concerned by the continuing decline in the perceptible health of the estuary, the zoo developed a subsidiary program dubbed the “Restore Our Shores” (ROS) initiative which focuses a broad coalition of volunteers and a handful of paid staff into a year-round operation to remediate the indispensable body of water. To understand the efforts the zoo undertakes and to evaluate their prospects, I participated in several of their multifarious volunteer initiatives and got to know the organization from the inside.

Restore Our Shores focuses the bulk of the relatively nascent project’s energy on two extensively researched but still largely experimental biological remediation methods: expansion of the endemic mangrove tree populations, and the reestablishment of severely overexploited oyster reefs. The ROS website and educational materials demonstrate that an adult oyster possesses the capacity to filter around 50 gallons of lagoon water each day

Mangrove propagules awaiting planting in the Indian River Lagoon. — Fig. 3 - Hundreds of mangrove propagules in experimental burlap pouches awaiting planting along lagoon shores and seawalls.

making them, in effect, a living filter for the estuarine ecosystem. According to the zoo staff, however, historical overharvesting decimated these endemic shellfish reefs, eliminating one of the system’s most important means of mitigating the pollution generated by rapid local development and subsequent runoff from inland industrial farming and residential lawn care. This, in turn, engendered a chain reaction of massive algae blooms that starved out seagrass populations, which then translated to mass fish kills that inevitably affected the top predators in the ecological web. The collective result? A community in environmental crisis.

To mobilize these restoration efforts, the Restore Our Shores program relies on a small team of committed employees and an astoundingly large network of community volunteers. “While the zoo employs some 200+ individuals there are, on average, 2 volunteers for every 1 paid employee here,” says Olivia Escandell, a Conservation Specialist with the ROS program, which itself employs less than a dozen individuals (personal communication, November 19, 2019). Olivia leads the grant-financed “Shuck and Share” program, among her other responsibilities, that serves as something of a genesis point for all further oyster-related efforts. Olivia, a zoo intern, and I traveled up and down the coast of Brevard County visiting an inspiringly vast number of local seafood restaurants that contribute their respective repositories of spent oyster shells to the zoo’s project, thereby eliminating a potentially crippling acquisition barrier to the reef-building mission. The shells are then dried and bagged at the local correctional facility and prepared by ROS staff and volunteers for deployment in a state-permitted site where they will ultimately remain as a permanent reef. These, after a thorough and lengthy establishment period, may one day serve to prevent expensive and carbon-heavy transportation of shellfish to a region that can no longer support its own industry autonomously.

team

The construction of these reefs is far from the end of the ROS team’s oyster operations; the labor required to maintain their fragile beginnings can seem perpetual. A new member amid the ranks, I enlisted for the foster care of fledgling oysters and aided in the construction of cages upon which oyster “spat” (babies) are cultivated. On a separate day, along with a few dozen Disney employee volunteers, I committed myself and my SCUBA equipment to the inspection and maintenance of established and establishing reefs. While two ROS team members and I inspected the reefs and made repairs to bags torn open by scores of snagged fishing lures, the rest of the day’s team attended the colinear task of replacing those beyond repair. Intermittently throughout the process, measurements are taken, and information is logged on the growth rate and overall progress of the carefully cultivated mollusk populations.

Recent valuations of the IRL’s economic impact have landed around the 7.64-billion-dollar

Fig. 5 - Callie Shaffer, with the ROS staff, places a propagule on the estuary coast.

mark, taking into account “a 4.6-billion-dollar, 20-year cost to eliminate harmful pollution,” (Defiebre, 2016) so it comes as no surprise that a significant community enterprise has accreted around the idea of the lagoon’s restoration. Cost-benefit analyses of such massive projects, however, are notoriously unreliable, failing to account for intangible values (e.g. visitor and resident enjoyment, animal lives, unquantified health effects, etc.) and for massive volunteer and unpaid intern contributions as in the case of the zoo. Consequently, the true value of the IRL and the efforts required to restore it remains elusive. Considering the scale of the “Restore Our Shores” operation, I inquired after the costs: how could the zoo, a non-profit entity, afford these myriad projects?

“Oh, this project couldn’t exist without volunteers,” quips Olivia on our ride from one seafood eatery to the next (personal communication, November 19, 2019). She went on to enumerate the byzantine reticulation of funding sources that make the projects possible: the half-cent tax passed to restore the lagoon by the Brevard County electorate; grants from government and private organizations; penalty remunerations from H.R. 5289, the Indian River Lagoon Nutrient Removal Assistance Act, 113th Congress (Murphy, 2014); public donations; an occasional stopgap from zoo proceeds while funding logjams are cleared or new sources are sought. What amazed me most, however, was that the volunteer opportunities (most of which go entirely unsolicited on the organization’s website) are practically endless, yet paradoxically, virtually always filled.

An oyster reef bag from the Indian River Lagoon restoration effort. — Fig. 6 - An example of the plastic netted bags that constitute the individual modules of an oyster reef construct. This one has been removed for growth inspection and monitoring.

On other fronts, “propagule” would become a new word in my lexicon, after the ROS team attached it to the narrow green cucumbers bobbing about in the lagoon and washing up on the nearby beaches. These curious vegetative sojourners, rather than traditional seeds, are dropped from adult mangroves in a plenary state, ready to root as incipient trees upon arrival at a sufficiently hospitable shore. Responsible for serving as a nursery and habitat for some 90% of Florida’s commercial fish species, for removing atmospheric carbon, and for filtering the lagoon water through their labyrinthine roots, the zoo cites the loss of one-third of the world’s mangrove trees as a pretext for their push to expand extant populations. With the team, I spent hours waist-deep in the tenebrous river water, placing experimental propagule sachets in crevices along the sharp,

slippery, rock-laden coast. Property owners with riparian rights volunteer their premises to the ROS program, thereby allowing the team to avoid protracted legal permitting inquiries, and the majority of the propagules themselves are collected by local volunteers. One can also sign up to foster these propagules at home until they are of sufficient size for a more traditional planting; mangroves are excruciatingly slow growers, adding to the challenge of restoring their numbers.

Thousands of pounds of oyster shell will form the foundation for new oyster reefs in the Indian River Lagoon. — Fig. 7 - Thousands of pounds of oyster shells dry in the sun for a minimum of 90 days before being bagged to become the foundation for new reefs.

Their herculean efforts duly noted, nevertheless, Restore Our Shores does not go without significant challenges. According to Olivia, the state expresses multiple concerns about the ROS projects, often causing protracted delays in project progress (personal communication, November 19, 20019). For one, the state government cites concern over impacting seagrass habitat (one of the very things ROS seeks to remediate); she explains that the Indian River Lagoon has seen some 70-80% reduction in population levels of seagrass over the last several decades (ibid). As follows, the organization selects sites with no extant seagrass, though they are still met with bureaucratic resistance despite this approach. A second concern is the employment of plastics in several of the reef components. “There’s a big problem with microplastics in the ocean and in the lagoon, we know that,” Olivia concedes “but any solution has to work, has to last, and has to be cost-effective. We’re still experimenting with several organic options to find a suitable alternative, but they’re often very expensive, and they have to be scalable; if it’s not scalable, it will never get done” (ibid).

A Restore Our Shores employee works to collect oyster shells. — Fig. 8 - Olivia Escandell, an ROS staff member, straps 400 pound barrels of spent oyster shells into a box truck for relocation to a drying cache.

Many of their recent permit applications have been repeatedly denied, with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) citing requests for additional information, some of which can’t be provided. Finally, failures in their supply chain have forced the team to diversify their hatchery network for oyster production, resulting in delays to the foster program (and postponing my own fostering experience until early 2020).

Today, the troubling decline of the Indian River Lagoon can be quickly understood through a few sobering figures: an 80% decline in local shellfish catches since 1994; 13,000 fewer boats registered than in 2005 (an 11% drop); fin fishing hauls that have plunged 37% since 1990, accounting for inflation (Defiebre, 2016)…the nation’s most diverse estuary is being slowly strangled to death. The Restore Our Shores team and, by extension, the Brevard Zoo is undertaking a project at a scale that I could never have imagined possible under the constraints of a non-profit’s limited resources. The question of the lagoon’s survival has become an open one - vast amounts of work remain unfinished, and many problems still want for plausible solutions. But if the intrepid labors of the Brevard Zoo, Restore Our Shores, and the colossal network of affiliated volunteers (of which I am now a permanent part) are any portent, I remain hopeful that I’ll see the diaphanous waters of my youth again…someday.