WaterNotes

In my three years of Lagoon exploration I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen white pelicans. Actually, I can count it on just two fingers.
While scouting locations for a field trip program late last year I happened upon an enormous flock of white pelicans and cormorants treading [...]

The St. Johns River Water Management District is circulating a warning of recent sightings of invasive Australian spotted jellyfish in the Indian River Lagoon near the Eau Gallie River. The first reported sightings of the spotted invaders came in the 2001 and 2002 seasons with no further jellies seen in the interim until just [...]

One hundred and nintey feet of shoreline on the lagoon. Three hours of my Tuesday morning. Two cups of coffee. One pair of gloves. Four giant trash bags. And a certain sense of defeat and exhaustion by lunchtime.
Here’s the tally:

19 plastic water bottles
57 cigar wrappers
193 cigarette butts
24 Coke [...]

After three years of teaching about the Indian River Lagoon and all its inhabitants a strange new question dawned on me this morning. One that I am surprised, all things considered, a student never asked me. Where did the ‘Indian River’ get its name?
There are many places in Florida that bear [...]

Over the weekend I hit the Lagoon once more for a serious cleanup. Instead of showing up in flipflops and a tanktop with a single bag to use I came with an absolute arsenal against trash. Pocket knives, a roll of bags, watershoes to go hunting in the shallows for marine debris, oatmeal [...]

“Would you flick that into your kids’ bathwater?” I’m trying to brainstorm and come up with short slogans about cigarette butts, which dominate the marine debris scene for the Indian River Lagoon. Over the last week I’ve been out to scour the same edge of water – as I’ve been reporting on for [...]

Strolling along the lagoon yesterday evening I spotted several dozen molts from American horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus). Horseshoes are some of my absolute favorite animals on the planet. From their incredibly long survival timeline (pre-dinosaur, arising nearly 540 Mya) to their awesome quicksilvery-blue blood there’s just a lot of quirky facts to relate [...]