ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has issed a warning of possible respiratory irritation from red tide for the Manatee and Sarasota area.
- Researchers from SPC studying reefs
- Dr. Heyward Mathews and team gauging health of reefs and impacts of red tide
- Group hoping for more grants to continue research
While Manatee and Sarasota officials continue to watch for red tide closely, levels show the event is over for Pinellas County.
But for a group of researchers from St. Pete College, the work is just beginning.
The group is trying to create a model to help scientists quantify damage from red tide and predict future recoveries.
Researchers say the near shore reefs are pretty beat up and in some cases they were wiped clean of life.
But for scientists, this important study will help predict how long a red tide recovery will take.
This is a study decades in the making for scientists and divers in Pinellas County. From the building of this artificial reef off Clearwater Beach in 1974 to a study in 2015 that got a baseline for the normal aquatic environment.
Dr. Heyward Mathews and his team at SPC are filling in the blanks, doing monthly dives at artificial reefs and natural ones, taking notes and collecting samples - all to gauge red tide impacts and build a model for the future - of what a red tide recovery looks like.
"O.K. so things got killed, what comes back first," said Mathews. "How long does it take to come back? So we want to find out how long it will take for the invertebrates, how long will it take for the fish?
"In this case, also whether or not the juvenile population was damaged there then, because of course that is our future."
Dr. Mathews' team got creative to the juvenile fish population. It built light traps to draw in plankton and tiny fish.
Dr. Monica Lara said researchers can bring the samples back alive and do extensive studies on the health of juveniles.
"The source of all the larvae is going to be somewhere in the gulf, that plankton travels quite far," Lara said. "And so we want to see when that starts to come in, what organisms start to come back in. so from the beginning of the establishment on those reefs that have been basically wiped clean."
Of course, studies like this take money.
Recently, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium has awarded grants to Dr. Mathews' team. The SPC team is hoping for another grant this year to help continue with dives and continue logging everything the tem is finding.
Dr. Mathews said the study also will help predict and quantify impacts of any accidents like oil spills in the gulf coast and help the state determine environmental damages.