Water Worlds

A long-ignored outpost along the Forgotten Coast, the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory discovers a new sense of purpose amid its unique setting.

by Lee Gimpel
photography by Ted Tucker

SweetTea Journal (Summer/Winter 2007) – If you were a red, gag, or scamp grouper, it would be understandable if you had self-image issues. Born exclusively female, part of the population of these large fish—popular with commercial and recreational fishermen—becomes male after about eight years in the water.

Undisturbed in the deep wild-blue yonder, the ratio is five females to one male. But for some species, human intervention may lead to ratios closer to fifty to one. Because grouper may stay female for nearly a decade before they mature into males—if that isn’t a contradiction—achieving a healthy status quo is a long process. While singers Jan & Dean lauded a seaside haunt where it was “two girls for every boy,” unbalanced odds are far from ideal offshore, both for the fish and the industry that relies on them to put the food on the table. Commercial fishing and the boating industry contribute more than $16 billion a year to Florida’s economy, while sportfishing and its ancillary tourism add another $8 billion.

The curious grouper reproduction (and its larger impact on the economy and the environment) is at the heart of work done by Dr. Felicia Coleman, who took over as director of the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory (FSUCML) in January of 2006. For Coleman, a South Carolina native, such issues are more than academic pursuits. While her studies have appeared in prestigious journals such as Science, she believes researchers have an imperative to share their knowledge with the public—particularly when the public is footing the bill. “Citizens pay for your research, and they have a right to know what you find,” she says.

Yet in 2006 when Coleman wanted to share her learning with the community, this impulse was met with resistance by some. A suggestion that the marine reserves (Madison Swanson Marine Reserve and Steamboat Lumps Marine Reserve) that sit seventy and one hundred miles off FSUCML’s bow should be closed to fishing year-round rather than just during spawning made waves in the fishing community. Some said the idea was an overreaction that didn’t hold water, labeling the proposal, “Felicia Coleman’s Gonad Bayou.” But when she explained how the rare male groupers—remember, they are eight years old before they switch from being female—that reside in the area don’t leave after spawning but hang around while the females leave, the picture became clearer. Fishing in the reserve before or after spawning would disproportionately hook males, thereby hurting the overall population. In the end, the idea of closing the reserves to fishing year-round won out when those involved saw that it made economic sense and was not just a pedantic academic exercise.

“Within the marine reserves we saw rather rapid increase in the percentage of males in the population and in the average size of the fish. I think people realized that, whether they liked what we were saying or not, they could trust what we were saying,” Coleman says.

Fishing is big business in Florida. This is why addressing ecological issues such as grouper reproduction is so important at FSUCML, located along the Big Bend sweep of coastline in St. Teresa. The lab offers unique opportunities for research, education, and outreach. Habitats range from inshore oyster reefs to offshore patch reefs, from freshwater bogs to sea grass and salt marshes. Research is done by the departments of biological science, oceanography, and anthropology, among others, and carried out by undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral investigators. The FSUCML hatched in 1949 as FSU’s Oceanographic Institute at Alligator Harbor. With a plot of land donated by Edward Ball—founder of The St. Joe Company—in the mid-1960s, the lab relocated a short way down the road to its current home on St. James Island.

It should come as no surprise that a small marine lab situated squarely along Florida’s so-called Forgotten Coast would be, well, forgotten. For much of its forty years it was an onshore outpost for FSU; the forty-five miles from the Seminole campus might as well have been an ocean. Although the university is renowned for its marine and oceanographic research, much of this work happens in labs or behind computers on the main campus in Tallahassee or in far-flung corners of the globe. FSUCML was being underutilized.

But, spurred by environmental changes in the area around FSUCML as well as recognition of the value of this unique property, the facility is no longer so forgotten. “We’ve given the lab the ability to upgrade its activity level,” says Dr. Ross Ellington, associate vice president for research and a former director of FSUCML. Ellington notes that there is increased personnel and funding, as well as more general attention being paid to the work done there. In addition to the new full-time, on-site director, FSU has allocated funding for four faculty members and three postdoctoral fellows to be on site, compared to the previous assignment of three off-site faculty and various postdoctoral students who would journey from the main FSU campus to use the lab.

The new hires are expected to bring in substantial grants from both FSU and outside agencies, which will, in turn, add more students, postdoctorals, and technicians to the lab’s day-to-day roster. Perhaps most important in the ascendancy of FSUCML is the fact that the director, Coleman, is based at the lab. Having the director on site represents a sea change from the old absentee-landlord model with the director based in Tallahassee and checking in at St. Teresa once or twice a week.

For those still making that drive, there’s little worry about traffic, though. At least for now. Heading south from the town and gown of Florida’s capital toward the lab, the metropolitan environs fade in the rearview mirror. Busy intersections where roadside vendors sell fresh seafood and pastel drawings give way to a two-dimensional world where everyone lives just off the main road. Billboards stop shouting about fast food, and quaintly offer cane sugar, Tupelo honey, and boiled peanuts.

The area that surrounds FSUCML would not be confused for Miami, Daytona, or Orlando. Rather than highways and high-rises, it’s small towns and pines. Rather than glittering sand and daydreamy blue water, it’s salt marsh and sea grass. Antithetical to chaise-longueing on the shore, this stretch of the Sunshine State has been off the Florida map, its topography protecting the coast and leaving it largely unmolested.

But that is starting to change. Ironically, the seclusion today brings visitors and new residents. “In the past two years it’s begun to change a lot,” says FSUCML lab manager Dennis Tinsley, who has lived in the area and worked at FSUCML for almost twenty years.

The area’s newfound popularity means new opportunities and challenges for FSUCML, a collection of unprepossessing bunkerlike buildings painted a grayish blue. On one hand, the lab is a logical candidate to take on a stewardship role—along with St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, the Apalachicola National Estuarine Research Reserve, and Tate’s Hell State Forest—in safeguarding the natural qualities of the area. On the other hand, there is now a recognition as to just how valuable and unique a backyard FSUCML has.

“What’s held it back is the lack of a determined effort to develop a program to which this place could be fundamentally useful,” says Dr. William F. Herrnkind, the Robert K. Godfrey Professor of Biological Science and the director of the lab from 1981 to 1985, who, with forty years in the classroom and a lean, Cousteauesque look, is FSUCML’s elder statesman. Now that the lab has an on-site director and seems to be finding a raison d’être for its research, Herrnkind sees a facility on its way up. There are seventy-two acres in FSUCML’s spread, most of it untouched as the laboratory complex sits on only a half-dozen acres. But most of what the lab does takes place outside the limits of its sylvan terra firma.

The majority of that research happens beneath a mobile of unflappable gulls, prehistoric-looking pelicans, and regal ospreys along the marshy coastline, in the shallows offshore, and in the open water. Yet for all of the excitement afforded by marine creatures, most of the research at FSUCML deals with subjects that will never steal the show at SeaWorld. A case in point is sea grass, which has a starring role at FSUCML. There are kinder ways to say it, but sea grass just isn’t very sexy. It doesn’t inspire people to print up bumper stickers to the effect of “Save the Sea Grass!” Many boaters see the long billowy tresses simply as the aquatic detritus that reaches out to strangle submerged propeller blades. Swimmers prefer to bathe unencumbered by its slimy strands.

As sea grass hasn’t been anyone’s cause célèbre, it has vanished in large swaths due to pollution, dredging, and a little cosmetic cleanup to make way for bikini-clad beaches. Thus, the area around FSUCML has a claim to fame—it constitutes one of the largest pristine sea grass beds in North America. Florida’s Big Bend area contains 740,000 acres of sea grasses, a large portion of the 2.5 million acres of sea grasses found in the shallow, clear waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Sea grass fosters a diversity of life that has scientists excited about its overlooked possibilities. There is, for example, considerable interest in a squishy reddish purple blob called Bugula neritina that is richly concentrated in the sea-grass fields and shows great promise for anticancer treatments. This slimy little creature may provide an early-warning system for the effects of toxic pollution as well.

But beyond lab tests that isolate obscure compounds, sea grass is the foundation of a good part of Florida’s coastal ecosystem and, thus, its economy. Jimmy Nelson, an FSU graduate student who grew up in a shrimping family, is doing research at FSUCML on the grouper that live in deep water off the coast. Averaging about three feet in length, these fish survive on a diet of smaller fish, octopus, crab, and lobster; it’s not a fish that’s sucking down sea grass. In fact, after they mature out of the shallows at a young age, the big, deep-dwelling creatures almost never venture close enough to shore to even see the prize beds of sea grass. But Nelson theorizes that the vegetation is vital to the survival of the valuable game fish. In many respects his work is reminiscent of grade-school diagrams of the food chain that show a hapless little fish eaten by a bigger fish, which in turn is eaten by an even larger, scarier predator, and so on.

Nelson’s focus is the grouper’s relationship with the small—and moderately hapless—pinfish, which lives near the shore and relies on sea grass for its livelihood. Every year the small bait fish abandon the warm, light-infused waters of the coast for darker depths where they spawn. According to Nelson, the biomass migration involves some four thousand tons of pinfish from the Big Bend alone. To the schools of grouper that just happen to live in the deep water where the pinfish are destined, this amounts to dinner delivered on a silver platter. Presumably fueled by this all-you-can-eat seafood smorgasbord, the grouper undertake their own after-dinner reproduction rites.

What Nelson is trying to show is that what happens in the narrow band of shallows has big consequences in the larger ocean. Without sea grass there are no pinfish, which are a crucial element in cooking up new grouper. If the pinfish never make it out to feed the precoital grouper, then the big fish may not effectively reproduce, and that leaves a very big hole in the food chain and, thus, in the fishing industry.

Coleman believes that part of her responsibility as the lab’s director is to get such research out of the ivory tower of academia and translate it into news that the public can grasp and appreciate. To get others to distill weighty work, she will ask her colleagues, “Why should my mother care?”

Accordingly, Coleman has been emphasizing outreach—particularly focusing on FSUCML’s neighbors who’ve recently started calling the area home. Only a few months after Coleman arrived, the lab hosted a successful open house in April 2006. More than three thousand people showed up—impressive when one considers that the population of nearby Sopchoppy is only about five hundred. Putting the lab and its research under the microscope apparently hit home with residents, who queued for standing-room-only research presentations.

FSUCML’s annual open house reaches an adult population, but the lab also runs programs geared toward elementary- and middle-school students. There are summer camps, but the crown jewel is the Saturday-at-the-Sea program, begun in the 1980s by Herrnkind. Students recall very few single days during their school careers, Herrnkind says, but it’s not uncommon for him to get a university student who will enthusiastically recount his or her one Saturday at FSUCML years earlier.

Interestingly, the number of kids who show up in St. Teresa having never been to the beach or out on the water is not insignificant. In a state where a huge expanse of salt water is never more than a morning’s drive away, it’s incredible to think of students who’ve been landlocked their entire lives. And that itself is quite a testament to hands-on learning, when students find themselves enthralled by education in the guise of a boat ride and the chance to handle bottom-dwelling creatures—or when a group of teenage girls calmly inspects a dozen dead fish with no squealing and little squeamishness.

Like someone getting tickled by a living sand dollar or a landlubber feeling the spray of moist air on a first boat ride, Coleman’s enthusiasm for the lab matches that of FSUCML’s younger visitors, albeit for different reasons. She’s excited about what the future holds for the facility that is now coming into its own at an important time.

“The faculty ... are already more interested and interactive than they’ve been in a long time. And this is a relatively pristine environment. It’s a perfect place to be conducting research on these kinds of ecosystems,” she says.

Ironically, for a facility largely concerned with what’s going on beneath the waves, Coleman, full of optimism concludes, “I think the sky’s the limit.”