[Coral-List] Serial fish video at Dodge Island sea-port
Eugene Shinn
eugeneshinn at mail.usf.edu
Thu Jun 15 20:16:20 UTC 2023
Dear Colin, I appreciate your situation at Dodge Island. I do hope you
can keep your serial fish video equipment humming. This is an area I
know very well or I or should I say I used to know very well back before
there was a Dodge Island. I go back to when there was just a series of
spoil bank islands populated by Australian pines. As a child I used to
camp on the eastern most island we called Sand Key. There was a small
cabin there that belonged to a friend of my Father. In those days my
Father used to rent a small boat at Bayfront park and we fished for
grunts and mangrove snappers just south of that string of islands. Years
later as a young high school teenager I learned to spearfish around the
north Jetty at Government Cut and under a pier on south beach just north
of Government Cut. That pier is long gone. Years later after attending
the University of Miami and working as a Shell Oil researcher for 15
years I joined the U.S. Geological Survey (dept of Interior) and
established a research lab in one of the old Customs buildings on Fisher
island. I maintained a lab and office of 5 researchers there from 1974
to 1989. Dr. Robert N. Ginsburg who had converted me to a geologist in
the 1960s had his U.M. office and taught students in the larger
Administration building next door. I first met Bill Precht when he was a
Ginsburg student next door on Fisher Island. The U.M. gave up those 15
acres and the buildings and we all vacated the island in 1989. The
Customs buildings have been replaced by large condo-size buildings.
There was a also a covered boat house where we kept our boat and a small
pontoon ferry boat we all used to cross Government Cut every day. The
conversion of those spoil island had begun and a bridge was built to
what became Dodge Island. The rest is history. It is worth inspecting
all this on Google Earth.
At our Fisher Island station in the mid 1980s we hosted a graduate
student from Texas A and M who was doing a study of drilling mud effects
on corals. We installed an intake PVC pipe in 30 ft of water in the ship
channel off the boat house and used a water pump to bring in clear sea
water during high tides. The water was for growing corals in large
aquaria. Unfortunately corals would not live in that water. Once a week
our student would take our boat offshore and fill plastic garbage cans
with clear Gulf Stream water. Corals grew quite well in that water so he
could perform his experiments. The student completed his PhD and
published his results. At that time there were many tropical fish in
Government Cut including large schools of snook and there were abundant
lobster but no corals. We assumed poor water-quality was due to the
sewer outfall less than a mile offshore. We could usually smell it
during a SE wind. Eventually the outlet was extended out to 114 ft of
water where many people fished around the sewage plume. (That is another
interesting story for later)
There had been some dredging in the ship channel in the vicinity of the
Cruise Ship base back in the 1970s. In fact one of the dredges sank and
blocked the port area for several months. This all happened well before
the more recent major dredging and widening of Government Cut that
occurred long after we vacated Fisher Island. Bill Precht was put in
charge of the coral reef monitoring during and after the dredging and
widening of the channel. Because I had dived the area since the 1950s I
can say there were few live corals there before the dredging which
exposed an extensive Holocene Acropora reef. Bill Precht as a frequent
contributor to the coral-list may want to verify what I observed.
I suppose the big question now is should the serial photography of fish
along the Dodge Island sea wall be continued. I see no reason why it
should not be continued. Of course the fish life is there because of the
concrete sea wall and man-made rubble. As for corals it is clearly not
suitable for extensive coral growth. All I can say is it is clear the
entire area including the Dodge island complex is entirely artificial.
Also the water quality is better than what I remember from the 1950s
when Miami sewage was pumped directly into the bay. I remember the odor.
Gene
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