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The WFSU Ecology Blog

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Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass

Operation Noah’s Ark

by Rob Diaz de Villegas August 16, 2010
by Rob Diaz de Villegas August 16, 2010 2 comments
Rob Diaz de Villegas WFSU-TV

The video above is from our dimensions program. It dovetails nicely with what we care about on this site, which is the ecology of Florida’s Forgotten Coast, in this case salt marshes.  The idea is that, when looking to minimize potential oil damage to our coast, you start with its smallest building blocks.  Operation Noah’s Ark, based out of the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab in Panacea, is collecting a lot of little critters that live in places like salt marshes. The fiddler crab helps maintain the marsh with its burrows, which bring oxygen to cordgrass roots.  In that grass, juvenile mullet find shelter, as do blue crabs and juvenile pinfish.  The Kemps-Ridley Sea Turtle eats those blue crabs, and those pinfish will mature and swim out into the gulf to be eaten by gag grouper.  You can see how one species becoming compromised can have a cascading effect throughout the Gulf.
P1000217

The interconnectedness of the coastal food-web underscores that we need to look at oil effects in the long term.  One population of fish may be healthy today, but if its prey is unhealthy and dies off then it too may die off.  This is a tricky thing to get people to think about.  Within the last couple of weeks, the Deepwater Horizon seep was capped, and the government declared that most of the oil has been broken up.  It feels good to think about this crisis ending, and life on the Gulf returning to some kind of normality.  I’m not saying it won’t.  But there is still a lot of oil in the Gulf, and dispersant, and damage isn’t always quick to present itself.  Riki Ott, a marine biologist who experienced the Exxon Valdez spill, points out that while the worst of the spill was deemed to be over two years later, the ecosystem crashed another two years after that when the Salmon in Prince William Sound died off.  And that of course had dire economic consequences.

In light of recent optimism, this kind of thinking isn’t always popular.  And these kinds of things are unpredictable.  It could be that the long term effects are minimal.  But considering what is at stake, it pays to be vigilant.

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blue crabcoastal ecologycordgrassdeepwater horizon oil spillfiddler crabGulf Specimen Marine Labmarine biologymarine ecologysalt marshsmooth cordgrassspartina alterniflora
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Rob Diaz de Villegas

Rob Diaz de Villegas is a senior producer for WFSU-TV, covering outdoors and ecology. After years of producing the music program OutLoud, Rob found himself in a salt marsh with a camera, and found a new professional calling as well. That project, the National Science Foundation funded "In the Grass, On the Reef," spawned the award winning WFSU Ecology Blog. Now in its tenth year, the Ecology Blog recently wrapped its most ambitious endeavor, the EcoCitizen Project. Rob is married with two young sons, who make a pretty fantastic adventure squad.

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2 comments

WFSU In the Grass, On the Reef February 17, 2012 - 6:35 pm

[…] reef (like David Kimbro in this video) or dragged a net by a salt marsh (like Jack Rudloe does here), you can see where pinfish spend their juvenile years hiding from larger predators. Same for the […]

WFSU In the Grass, On the Reef February 14, 2013 - 10:15 am

[…] your turn).  I first went there with Jack Rudloe, who dragged a net in the water and gave us a quick lesson in marsh ecology from the animals he caught (and quickly released).  The WHO festival took place in the St. Marks […]

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iNaturalist became a part of the WFSU Ecology Blog during the EcoCitizen Project in 2019.  Since then, we’ve used it to help identify the many plants and animals we see on our shoots.  And on the Backyard Blog, we show how it can be used to identify weeds and garden insects, to help figure out what’s beneficial or a possible pest.  Below is the iNaturalist profile belonging to WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas.

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