Indian River Lagoon

Hello, everyone, and welcome to One Lagoon, One Voice, the podcast from the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, where we talk all things lagoon with smart people doing great work in the Indian River Lagoon.

I am Jessy Wales, community engagement coordinator for the IRLNEP and your host for this episode.

Who doesn't love seeing dolphins in the wild? Even after all the years I've spent on the water, I still stop and smile every time one surfaces nearby.

But as much as I enjoy seeing them, I didn't realize that I actually don't know too much about dolphins that call the Indian River Lagoon home.

So that's exactly what we're diving into today.

Joining us is a guest who will answer some of the most common questions about these amazing animals, like what species of dolphins actually live in the lagoon? How many are there? Are they different from the dolphins we see in the Atlantic? What have you learned about what they're doing? And if you could be a dolphin for a day, what would you do? We'll cover all of that and more, so stay tuned and let's get started.

We're pretty busy.

We're one of the busiest programs in the state of Florida, so we get about 70 animals each year.

Florida completes $50 million C-23 canal diversion.

Florida has completed a $50 million water management project designed to reduce damaging freshwater and nutrient discharges into the St. Lucie estuary, adding another operating piece to the long-running restoration of the Indian River Lagoon.

The C-23 Canal Estuary Discharge Diversion Project includes a new seven-mile canal and a pump station with three pumps capable of moving approximately 112,000 gallons of water per minute, redirecting excess water from the C-23 Canal toward the C-44 Reservoir and stormwater treatment area instead of the estuary.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and the South Florida Water Management District marked the project's completion on Sept. 9 after operational testing confirmed the system was ready for use.

Rapid changes in salinity can stress fish, oysters, seagrasses and other species and stormwater moving through developed or agricultural watersheds can carry nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, and other pollutants downstream.

Reducing the volume of direct freshwater flows while routing water into infrastructure designed to store and treat it addresses both problems at once.

Constructed wetlands do much of that treatment work, and the Army Corps of Engineers describes the broader Indian River Lagoon South Restoration Program as an effort to reduce high-volume watershed discharges and nutrient loads while improving salinity and water quality, targeting sediment, phosphorus, and nitrogen entering the St. Lucie River estuary and southern Indian River Lagoon.

one piece of a much larger restoration program.

that's it max how did you guess it man wow you're just so on it all right this is gonna be a long one and i'm gonna need everyone to lock in okay because it's complicated so when dolphins beach themselves people work really hard to get them back in the water but often it's not enough the individual dies and when that happens if there's a lab nearby marine biologists will often do an autopsy on the animal yeah it's one of the ways that we learn out learn more about these animals i mean obviously it's a biased data set because they've all beached themselves, but you can find out a lot from this sort of stuff, like what sort of diseases they're being exposed to, all sorts of things like that, genetics.

So this team of researchers in Florida, and I don't have a QS ranking for you because they're from a bunch of different interesting institutions, a bunch of researchers in Florida in the US looked at the brains of 20 common bottlenose dolphins that were found stranded in the Indian River Lagoon.

Now, this is a pretty big estuary on the east coast of Florida in the US, but the key thing about it is that it has frequent occurrences of harmful algal blooms.

So we'll be pretty familiar with that now because we have one happening in South Australia at the moment.

But neurotoxins are very big in – that's what's happening in South Australia.

That is also one that has a neurotoxin that affects the brain.

So anyway, one of the things in this place, in the Indian River Lagoon, is that it also – the increase in frequency of the harmful algal blooms in that area have been linked to climate change.

they've been increasing it's linked to the warmer water that has been coming through climate change apparently the water in this area has been increasing it's like the increasing temperature at such a rate like it's a it's a hot spot for ocean heating in this area

It's just like, you know, up in Brevard County, we just completed a poll, very conservative area.

You would think they wouldn't be big environmentalists, right? 74% are going to support, claim on our poll, that they're going to support a half penny tax to clean up the Indian River Lagoon.

That's, you know, because they want to protect that Indian River.

They want it to be beautiful.

They want to see it get cleaned up.

And I wonder if some of that's going to involve septic to sewer because they're all up and down the coast.

and you have this powder keg of a water system known as the Indian River Lagoon, you drop one more

drop of phosphate in there, and it goes, poof, algae bloom, you know?

And I want to say, Alex, it's, I think we're on the fourth year.

We just started our fourth year of, of the no catch or no keep on redfish here in East central Florida in the Indian river lagoon system.

Um, it's something like that.

Yeah.

For a while, you know, uh, we were always catching redfish and black drum and trout, but our numbers did drop.

Uh, and I do believe, and I can't prove it.

If I was a betting man, um, uh, I would say that our redfish, because of lack of habitat, which is a big part of the Florida coastal corridor, and so thankful for the habitats being created with that from the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida, but lack of habitat, loss of habitat, specifically seagrass, in the Mosquito Lagoon and the northern portions of the Indian River Lagoon, I believe, forced those fish, those redfish, to then leave.

I think they swam north.

It gets into the water table and then leaks in from there.

I mean, it's the same thing that happened over at the Indian River Lagoon.

It's the same exact thing.

Right.

Bob, we were talking about tarpon.

We've got right now in the Indian River Lagoon, um, I know Captain Max, uh, McKinley was jumping some over the weekend.

Captain Buddy Kirkhart, all good friends of the show, down in the Stuart area in the Treasure Coast, they're on some tarpon.

I'm in the northern section of the Indian River Lagoon.

And, uh, you know, last summer you and I during ICAST got to go chase some tarpon, had some fun doing that.

But I've got some jumbos around right now.

It was not something that I was even thinking about when I started working here at the zoo.

I started in the education department doing a lagoon quest program out in the Indian River Lagoon.

So not snake related at all.

Even a little bit.