Oysters, Tarpon and Tornadoes ... by gimleteye

For the past two springs, migrating tarpon in the Florida Keys have been plentiful. This is, on face value, startingly good news in an age of dwindling fisheries. It is perplexing, though, because water quality in the Keys has sharply declined in recent decades.

Miami Herald fishing writer Susan Cocking suggests—because there is no knowing—that tarpon in the past two seasons have been attracted to warmer water temperatures. For certain, the same warm gulf that is half the equation of the massive spawn of tornadoes in the American south is good for tarpon. There is another possible explanation.

Tarpon are migratory and spend a good part of their life cycle traversing the Gulf of Mexico, from Mexico along the Texas coast into Gulf waters, then around the Florida peninsula towards North Carolina. In other words, through the region where Deepwater Horizon triggered the worst environmental disaster in US history.

We can't ask these prehistoric creatures whether bad Gulf water chased them across the Gulf into the Keys, instead of lingering where food supply may be even more scarce; but these stupid fish are pretty damn smart when it comes to getting out of harm's way. They didn't survive millions of years on luck.

They are hard wired to evade threats, and that's more than I can say about our highly evolved species. We are wired to the short-term. In a recent speech, former vice president Al Gore noted-- with some humor-- that we respond to the scrolling bars at the bottom of CNN and Fox as a matter of instinct: back in the day when predators chased us, failing to capture the smallest changes in our environment could be the difference between life and death.

Some of us are resentful that science will never overtake the complexities of a changing climate or our influences. But we do have guides from the past. Dr. Harold Wanless, the chair of the geology department at the University of Miami, has been studying core samples taken from the tip of the Everglades. The relic oyster shells and fossil record shows that sea level rise, as a consequence of global climate events, has exposed and submerged Florida several times. Science also shows that when sea levels rose, they rose rapidly.

Can we learn to pay our debts, forward, instead of consuming everything at hand with self-righteous justifications? We are a remarkable species. Moreover, in America we crow about "exceptionalism" but our politics are as base today as they have ever been. The question for civilization is: can we by-pass what harms us and reverse climate change. Can we change our behaviors without the assurances of science to predict exactly where the next tornado will strike? We had better adapt quickly, because the lessons from Florida is that putting the pieces back together once the whole has been broken-- the Everglades-- makes us less likely than tarpon to survive what comes next.