Despite decades of pledges to protect the panther, today only about 100 survive in Florida’s dwindling wilderness areas. That’s because, while politicians like to hold press conferences declaring their commitment to protecting the beloved panther, they rarely – if ever – say no to developers who want to bulldoze panther habitat.

The story of Florida Gulf Coast University is a prime example. Craig Pittman of the Tampa Bay Times spent years chronicling the ultimately fruitless effort to protect the panther habitat:

In the mid 1990s, Florida politicians wanted to build a new university on swampy land near Fort Myers that was owned by an influential campaign contributor who wanted to develop all the land around it. Their plan involved destroying 75 acres of wetlands, which required permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After months of study, the corps had not made a decision.

Col. Terry Rice, who ran the corps in Florida, was on an airboat in the Everglades when his cell phone rang. The caller, Rice recalled, began “cussing me out” for delaying the permit for Florida Gulf Coast University. The caller: Connie Mack, then Florida’s Republican U.S. senator.

“He used some terms over the telephone that weren’t very flattering,” Rice said. “It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.” [...]

Mack’s call wasn’t unusual. Public interest is supposed to drive the corps’ decisions, but politicians often lean on the corps on behalf of private interests. Politicians from the president on down say they want to preserve wetlands. But when a well-connected constituent wants help to destroy wetlands, elected officials are quick to oblige.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which spends more than $1.2 million a year on panther protection, has not blocked a single development that altered panther habitat,” reported Pittman in his exhaustive 2010 two-part report on the panther. Read part one and part two.

The National Wildlife Federation and the Florida Wildlife Federation, our state affiliate, have spent years fighting to protect the Florida panther. In cases where we felt federal officials used flawed science to allow developers to wipe out critically-needed panther habitat, we’ve gone to court, winning two lawsuits to protect Florida panthers from reckless permitting.

As Pittman has reported, at one point officials even claimed there were too many panthers – that the 78 living panthers were 28 more than needed to sustain the population. That claim was used to justify an expansion of Ft. Myers Airport into panther habitat. The biologist who wrote that report later said his bosses pushed ahead even though the claims were “known by the entire scientific community to be wrong.”

Florida panthers are solitary creatures who require a huge amount of territory – 200 square miles for males, 75 square miles for females. The panthers can be beneficial to people by hunting animals that otherwise breed unchecked to the point of nuisancy- white-tailed deer, feral hogs, armadillos, raccoons and small alligators.

Florida Gulf Coast plays the University of Florida on Friday night at 9:57pm ET and despite having Florida in the final of my bracket, I’ll be rooting for FGCU. How can you not? But I hope that their rise brings renewed attention to the need to protect the Florida panther habitat that their school was literally founded on.

Take Action

Ask President Obama and your members of Congress to protect the Florida panther and other endangered species nationwide  by supporting investments in crucial wildlife conservation programs.

Fishing in the Florida mangroves.

There I was, a mosquito biologist on a hot summer day, knee deep in the mud of a mangrove swamp bordering the Indian River Lagoon, the long estuarine system along the Florida east-coast.  I had given up trying to get a “biting count” (believe it or not, you actually try to count the number landing on you in one minute…an ‘index’ of misery!).

I had stood in this very spot two weeks before, and there were none, but shortly after that the tide had risen sharply, flooding the mangrove swamp and apparently hatching the myriad of saltmarsh mosquito eggs secreted in the mud.  I had missed finding the larvae, a critical part of any control effort.

Frustrated, I jammed my dipper, the long-handled scoop which is the main tool of the mosquito larvae sleuth, into a small puddle. No larvae, of course, but four small fish darted frantically about in the dipper. Always interested in fish, I glanced at them and could not immediately identify them, so I placed them in a bucket.

Sometimes it is the smallest things that are life-changing: this simple act, placing the four little fish in a bucket, has led to over 25 years of research and insights into the remarkable life of a very unusual fish.

The mangrove rivulus is the only known vertebrate which is a selfing, simultaneous hermaphrodite, able to “clone” themselves.

The “well known” part was due to a very unusual sex life: this is the only known vertebrate which is a selfing, simultaneous hermaphrodite—they “clone” themselves. Adult rivulus have a complex reproductive organ, and internally self-fertilized eggs are laid which hatch into exact genetic duplicates of the parent…with some exceptions, as you shall see. Oddly enough, pure male rivulus, which differ from the “herms” in having a bright orange/red tint, had been caught in the wild, but their function was unknown: sexual reproduction had been documented in the lab but never in the wild…but more on this later.

Covered with mosquito bites, I kept glancing in the bucket on the way back to my office that day. Once I got an ID on my fish, a few days later I was back in the mangrove swamp, peering at the small puddle where I had collected the fish. But this was no common puddle! I immediately recognized it as a water-filled land crab burrow. With a quantum leap in collecting technology, I plunged a small net into the murky depths of the burrow, and withdrew it with 5 more rivulus.  A few more dips, and I had a total of 13.  I was floored to realize that I had just collected more rivulus in one location than anyone ever had before.

Setting traps for rivulus in Florida mangroves.

More than a Hole in the Ground

After gently placing the fish back in the burrow, I left, wondering if this association was mere coincidence.

The great land crab (Cardisoma guanhumi) is a large blue crab found throughout the shorelines of the tropical Atlantic, but it is actually a terrestrial crab. It digs burrows in saltmarshes and mangroves and sometime inland for some distance. The burrows are dug to the depth of groundwater, typically about 2-3 ft. deep, and the crab uses the pool of water to moisten its gills.

I began to suspect that the “scarcity” of rivulus had more to do with “looking in all the wrong places.” I was right. I checked crab holes far and wide, in every saltmarsh and mangrove swamp where my job led me. In the ensuing years, I have collected several thousand rivulus, and not just in Florida: I have found them in Belize, and also in Honduras, the Bahamas and Cuba.

The relationship seems well established. So, in Florida at least, rivulus is not as rare as originally thought, but still rare enough to warrant designation by the state as a “Species of Special Concern” and collection is prohibited without a permit.

Fish or Amphibian?

Early in my burrow-peering days, I found that sometimes rivulus would be out of the water, stuck to the side of the burrow, well above the water line. This behavior apparently offers the fish a means of avoiding poor quality water. During these aerial jaunts, the fish becomes torpid and respires through an extensive capillary network in the skin and fins.

My colleague Dr. Patricia Wright from the University of Guelph in Canada has been studying the physiology of emersion in her lab for years, and her findings are remarkable. My own lab study has shown that they can live at least two months out of the water in damp habitats: when re-flooded after 66 days, they were skinny, but eager to eat and devoured mosquito larvae immediately!

The adaptive value of emersion was dramatically revealed when I came upon a macabre scene inside a crab burrow where dozens of small minnows had been stranded by receding tides.  Not as hardy as rivulus, the minnows began to die and rot, and I observed several rivulus emersed above and on the rafts of floating corpses, waiting for conditions to improve.  A week later, when all trace of the dead fish was gone, only live rivulus were left in the burrow.

It turns out that rivulus will also occupy small, shallow pools at higher elevations in the mangroves. These pools flood and dry intermittently with higher tides or heavy rainfall. It is rare to find other fish species here, as they die when the pools dry. In Belize, my colleagues William P. Davis and Bruce J. Turner and I were puzzling over where the rivulus went when such pools dried.  We had assumed that they would retreat to adjacent crab burrows or burrow into masses of mangrove leaf litter.  It turns out that there were other housing options when your pool dries up.

Dr. Eric Reyier and I performing a visual census. I’m wearing pink “tags” for labeling filed sites.

The Birds and the Bees

Speaking of sex (were we?), I have already alluded to the mysterious presence of male fish in an hermaphroditic species. Why would nature find this necessary? We know that male fish regularly show up in laboratory colonies of rivulus, and rearing the developing eggs at lower temperatures (~ 20° C /68° F) produces a high percentage of males, but low temperatures are not a common phenomenon in the tropics.  So, my colleagues and I were shocked in our initial collections in Belize to discover that fully 25 percent of the population was male, and this high ratio has now persisted for over two decades. A few stray males have shown up in Florida, and a couple from the Bahamas and Honduras, but something strange is going on in Belize, because there the fish is reproducing sexually.

Apparently, in the presence of these flashy males, the herms somehow suppress internal self-fertilization (a fascinating physiological problem in itself!) and lay unfertilized eggs, which are then fertilized externally by the males.  Of course, in the murky confines of a crab burrow (not the most romantic of settings), this has never been observed, but geneticists can tell by looking at the DNA that ‘sex’ is happening here!

When some wild Belize fish produce self-fertilized eggs in captivity, the offspring are not genetically identical. This means that at some point in prior generations, sexual reproduction occurred. Cloning has taken a lesser role here. Why? We don’t know. And the real puzzler is why would you need sex in an animal that appears to be eminently successful without it? After all, if you are distributed from southern Brazil to central Florida and throughout the entire Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic, you must be doing something right.  This extensive range does speak to the advantages of ‘waif dispersal’: it only takes a single individual to found a population.

As they say, much remains to be done, but I thank my lucky stars that I did not discard that dipper full of murky water on that fateful, mosquito-ridden day 25 years ago.  I still stalk the mangroves and look for other miracles. And there are others out there, to be sure.

D. Scott Taylor was raised in east central Florida and has a PhD in marine biology. His career interests are in mangrove fishes, where he has studied at field sites in Belize, Honduras, Cuba, the Bahamas and coastal Florida, battling mosquitoes the entire time.  He is currently a land manager with the Brevard County (Florida) Environmentally Endangered Lands Program, charged with managing and restoring Florida’s diverse natural habitats.

This guest blog is part of our 2013 National Wildlife Week celebration of trees and the wildlife that depend on them.

USFWS Headquarters/Flickr

I’m a native Floridian and have lived most of my life just a few steps from the Gulf of Mexico in the quiet paradise of downtown Naples, Florida. I spent every possible moment outdoors; so, I should have been prepared to identify what I saw out of the corner of my eye while swimming with my sister offshore, right?

Apparently not.

As soon as I glimpsed the two massive, amorphous gray blobs swimming towards me, my already active imagination flipped into overdrive and bypassed the obvious conclusion that the shapes were nothing but two whiskery manatees.

Naturally, I screamed at the top of my lungs and swam as fast as possible towards the shore, leaving my sister to the “mercy” of the strange, shadowy figures eight feet away. After several seconds of panicked swimming, I began to laugh hysterically, realizing the absurdity of my mistaken conclusion that these creatures were out there to eat me. I then turned around to enjoy the incredible sight.

In High Tide or Low Tide…But Not Red Tide

Though this interaction paints me in a rather embarrassing light, it was an extraordinary experience to have two peaceful manatees happen upon us so naturally.

Manatee populations have been suffering for decades due to human activities – we flock to coastal areas and replace natural shoreline environments with concrete developments – bringing the animals into contact with boat propellers and contributing to dramatic habitat destruction. While the mammal is currently listed as endangered, years of conservation efforts have improved manatee populations though grave threats still remain.

USFWS Endangered Species/Flickr

HABs can result when excess nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen are added to aquatic systems, essentially fertilizing the algae and causing populations to increase exponentially. The bloom currently impacting these manatees is caused by a type of phytoplankton called Karenia brevis that produces toxins detrimental to both humans and marine wildlife. Manatees in Florida’s warm waters typically feast on sea grass, so when the phytoplankton settles on marine plants, the animals can ingest the toxins. The manatees then lose coordination and cannot surface to breathe.

This particular bloom has been referred to as red tide and it has already killed more than 240 manatees this year. This alarming figure already surpasses the previous record for algae-related manatee deaths in a calendar year, when 151 manatees died in 1996.

Protect the Gulf’s Wildlife

A view of the Gulf from my hometown beach. NWF photo by Glenn Watkins

In Florida, one way to improve water quality in Gulf waters is by restoring America’s Everglades, particularly focusing on the Caloosahatchee River (C-43 Basin Storage Resorvoir) project and the elevation of Tamiami Trail. These two projects will improve the quality and quantity of freshwater flows into the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the amount of nutrient pollution entering coastal environments.

These recent manatee deaths highlight just how complex and interconnected water systems are, reminding us that our actions have incredibly far-reaching consequences. For the sake of Florida’s manatees and other wildlife, we need to restore the Gulf ecosystem.

On the 19th of February, the Student Environmental Association (SEA) led an on campus march at the University of South Florida (USF) to rally for environmentally friendly legislative change. Protesters united and called for the enactment of laws that were both relevant to climate change and consistent on addressing the issue. Students brought positive energy, large signs, and loud voices in order to get this point across, chanting “No coal / No oil / We don’t want our world to boil!,” and “Hey hey / ho ho / Keystone Pipeline’s got to go!,” as well as my personal favorite: “Hey, Obama! We don’t want no climate drama!”

Southern Energy Network’s Florida Organizer, Jacquie Ayala, speaks to the media at students press conference

As the protesters and cameras crammed into the hallway outside his office, a representative invited us in and offered to meet with us. A dozen student activists poured into the cramped meeting room as we delivered the letter and made our case. Kendall Donahue spoke on behalf of the protesters, telling the representative that Rubio’s constituents were calling for environmental legislative support for President Obama. She asked that Rubio come forth and openly declare climate change as a real and detrimental problem, as well as support Congressional legislative change to help resolve this serious concern.

Student protesters march to Sen. Marco Rubio’s office

From here, protesters marched to the Patel Center, where the National Climate Assessment Town Hall Meeting was taking place. We concluded the march with a few final chants outside the building, as well as a discussion amongst the students about future opportunities of activism. Our successful march and rally that day is just one component of making sure our voices are heard. Many more demonstrations will have to occur for positive change, but we are all for putting that effort out there. We are students. We are activists. We care about our environmental legacy. And that, my friends, is what democracy looks like.

Victoria Griener is a junior at the University of South Florida studying Anthropology and Environmental Policy. She is a tour guide at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, where she educates people about nature conservation in relation to biodiversity loss, and is a member of the school’s  Student Environmental Association (SEA). She hopes to specifically go into the fields of primatology and primate conservation, but the entire field of wildlife protection fascinates her. Victoria has a personal nature photoblog at sunshineraeee.tumblr.com. See more coverage of the student protest in Creative Loafing. 

This past weekend, something remarkable happened — more than 35,000 people came to Washington D.C. from all over the country to make sure President Obama heard our message: take action on climate, reject the Keystone XL pipeline. So, was President Obama listening while we took to the streets in the dead of winter? It’s hard to tell. While thousands of Americans marched in the cold to call for action on climate, the President was in Florida ‘on the green’ with leading figures in the Texas oil and gas execs. For most Washington insiders this can be chalked up to par for the course, but for a president who has stressed the urgency of addressing climate change this is a bogey.

Share on Facebook to add your support for wildlife threatened by climate change and dirty energy.

An Invitation to the President

The President’s golf game got us to thinking, how willing is he to check out things from our perspective? Jim Murphy, National Wildlife Federation’s senior counsel and tar sands campaigner, issued an invitation:

“President Obama, we realize that this is how business gets done in Washington, which is why we’d like to formally invite you to trade in your golf spikes for some hiking boots. So next time you’re down in Florida, come with us on a tour of the Everglades, where wildlife like sea turtles and Key Deer are losing crucial habitat due to climate change. Or if you’d like something closer to home, hang out with us at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, one of the country’s best waterfowl habitats that’s facing catastrophic sea level rise.  We can’t promise a caddy, but we guarantee it will be a lot of fun.”

President Obama says he’s serious about combating climate change, but he needs to show his commitment by rejecting Keystone XL. If 40,000 people marching in Washington D.C. wasn’t enough to make our message loud and clear then we’ll get louder.  This past week is just more evidence that we need to raise our voices to make sure he is standing up for people and wildlife.

Share this photo on Facebook to stand up for wildlife at risk from Keystone XL and the climate crisis>>

Bahia Honda, a subtropical gem in the Florida Keys, harbors numerous rare plants and animals. Photo © Susan Stein.

Where’s the Native Wildlife?

Miami blue butterfly on Bahia Honda in 2003. This species was last seen on the island in January 2010. Photo: J. Glassberg.

The Miami blue once extended from the Dry Tortugas in the south up along the Florida coasts to about St. Petersburg and Daytona. Its decline resulted from a variety of factors, most notably loss of habitat. On Bahia Honda, however, one of the most significant factors in its recent demise has been a flourishing population of non-native iguanas. These introduced reptiles, which can grow to a yard long, have developed a taste for the young shoots of the gray nickerbean (Caesalpinia bonduc), the host plant for the Miami blue’s eggs and larvae. These ill-tempered and voracious lizards appear to have literally eaten the Miami blues into oblivion on this island.

Iguana basking in gray nickerbean, the host plant for the endangered Miami blue butterfly. Photo © Susan Stein.

And Everglades National Park, one of the nation’s crown jewels, is the epicenter of an invasion of Burmese python, a non-native constrictor snake that research now documents has almost completely wiped out this sensitive ecosystems rabbits, raccoons, deer, and other small mammals. Although the endangered Florida panther may be too large or cautious to be caught and killed directly by these constrictor snakes, by consuming much of the panther’s food source the snake will almost certainly lead to further declines for this endangered large cat.

Stemming the Invasive Tide

Burmese python have nearly wiped out small mammals in portions of Everglades National Park. Photo: by Bob DeGross, National Park Service.

Trying to control these pests once they have established themselves is difficult, costly, and often futile. A far better approach, ecologically and economically, is to keep them out in the first place. One obvious place to start is to better regulate the import of species known to pose a risk to U.S. ecosystems. Last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under pressure from NWF and its partners, made a good start by banning the import of four species of large constrictor snakes that were deemed to present just such a risk.

Unfortunately, bowing to political pressure from a small but vocal lobby of reptile breeders, an additional five constrictor snakes that Fish and Wildlife considers to present an invasion risk, such as the reticulated python and green anaconda, were excluded from that import ban. National Wildlife Federation views the listing of these additional constrictors as “injurious species” under federal law to be a top priority in 2013.

The current system for assessing and limiting imports of invasive and potentially invasive species—designed before the days of lightening fast transcontinental shipping and dramatic expansion of the exotic pet trade—is too slow and unwieldy and badly in need to reform. Fortunately, with NWF support, bills introduced in the last Congress propose common sense reforms that would create a new screening system for evaluating the risk of invasion that species pose, and give the Fish and Wildlife Service greater flexibility and authority to make science-based decisions to prohibit or restrict trade in certain live animals. With the start of a new Congress, reintroduction and passage of bills such as Representative Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) Invasive Fish and Wildlife Prevention Act is an imperative to better protect our nation from the onslaught of new harmful and costly invasions.

Packing up our campsite back on Bahia Honda in preparation for the long drive home is always bitter sweet. There’s next year’s visit to look forward to, sustained by memories of the snappers we caught this time, and paddles through the mangroves and over the clear waters. But the demise of the Miami blue butterfly on the island—one small but important strand of the key’s biological web—is emblematic of what we already have lost in this “American Paradise.”

How You Can Help

Donate today and help National Wildlife Federation continue to work for wildlife, including Miami blue butterflies and Florida panthers at risk from invasive species.

Koontz’s suit ignores the public’s strong interest in wetlands protection and the state and federal laws protecting that public interest.  It is critically important for people and wildlife that the Court does not, and that the Supreme Court justices understand and respect the public’s strong interest in wetlands protection and the state and federal laws protecting that public interest.

A white heron with a tiny catch. Flickr photo by Marc Banks.

What the Science Says

The real “friends of the Court” on whose behalf this brief was written are distinguished wetland scientists, academics, and professionals who are former members of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Mitigating Wetland Losses. Their 2001 NRC report, “Compensating for Wetland Losses under the Clean Water Act,” concluded that the widely accepted policy goal of “no net loss” of wetlands was not being achieved. The report recommended policy reforms to ensure that permit conditions reflect a tight nexus between wetland functions lost as the result of permitted activity and wetland functions gained through compensatory mitigation projects.

In our brief, and in our on-going wetlands work, we emphasize:

• Wetlands provide essential ecosystem services and economic value to people, businesses, and communities. These ecosystem services include improving water quality, providing flood control and coastal storm mitigation, supporting fish, shellfish, avian, and other wildlife populations, and sequestering climate-harming carbon.
• The destruction and degradation of wetlands trigger a cumulative loss of wetland functions and services, harming people, communities, and wildlife.
• Consequently, “no net loss” of wetland function is a widely accepted objective of federal and state water law.
• To achieve “no net loss,” wetland impacts must be avoided and minimized to the extent practicable. Any remaining impacts should then be eliminated or offset through compensatory mitigation projects: restoration, enhancement, creation, and/or preservation of other wetlands.
• There must be a tight nexus between wetland functions lost due to permitted activity and wetland functions to be gained through wetland mitigation in order to achieve “no net loss” of wetland functions and services and protect the public’s interest in the water quality, flood protection, and fish and wildlife habitat services that wetlands provide.

Wetland scientist Joy B. Zedler, past chair of the NRC Committee on Mitigating Wetland Losses, sums it up best: “There is no excuse to continue to allow wetland losses, now that we know how effective wetlands are in providing clean water and other essential services.”

The wetland scientists have spoken. Let’s hope the Supreme Court will listen.

The Florida Water and Land Conservation Amendment is a ballot initiative to stop the raiding of conservation funds and return to protecting important habitat areas.

In recent years, the funding that was intended for protecting important streams, wetlands, forests, and beaches has been diverted away from conservation. In fact, the Florida state legislature has cut conservation spending by nearly 98 percent. Florida, known for its breathtaking habitats and intriguing creatures, now spends less than one dollar per Floridian on conservation. We need to act now to restore funding to preserve our conservation legacy for the next generation before it’s too late.

Right now we have a chance to secure funding that will protect water quality and restore wildlife habitats by making sure the Florida Water and Land Conservation Amendment appears on Florida’s 2014 state ballot. The Florida Water and Land Conservation Amendment would amend the state constitution to safeguard conservation money—dedicating funds to help fish and wildlife habitats, protect water quality, restore the Everglades and much more.

Help build support for conservation!

• Facebook: Spread the word by sharing this photo of an adorable manatee! Remind your friends to sign the petition when they see a volunteer on Election Day.
• Don’t have Facebook? Send your friends an electronic postcard of a roly-poly manatee. Help support the Florida Water and Land Conservation Amendment and encourage your friends to sign the petition on Election Day.
• Volunteer: We need 50,000 more signatures by November 31st to get the Amendment reviewed by the Florida Supreme Court. With millions of Floridians headed to the polls on November 6, it may be our best chance at gathering the signatures needed. We know that with enough dedicated volunteers, we can reach our goal of 50,000 signatures. Sign up today!

A burrowing owl stretches near its den after a storm

 
Photo by Flickr member Moments In Nature by Joshua Clark
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