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NYTimes.com Details Brevard’s Environmental Challenges

By  //  August 8, 2013

NYTimes.com focuses on Brevard County

In Merritt Island, Fla., biological scientists use nets to capture and record data on fish. (Rene Aldrin Capulong for The New York Times)
In Merritt Island, Fla., biological scientists use nets to capture and record data on fish. (Rene Aldrin Capulong for The New York Times)

EDITORS NOTE: The below exerpted story appeared on NYTimes.com yesterday, and details our environmental challenges here on the Space Coast. To read the entire story on NYTimes.com, CLICK HERE.

Deaths of Manatees, Dolphins and Pelicans Point to Estuary at Risk

By , NYTimes.com

Richard Paperno, a researcher, at the helm in the Indian River Lagoon last month. Along 50 miles of northern estuary waters off Brevard County and the Kennedy Space Center, hundreds of manatees and pelicans and scores of bottlenose dolphins have died in the past year. (Rene Aldrin Capulong for The New York Times)
Richard Paperno, a researcher, at the helm in the Indian River Lagoon last month. Along 50 miles of northern estuary waters off Brevard County and the Kennedy Space Center, hundreds of manatees and pelicans and scores of bottlenose dolphins have died in the past year. (Rene Aldrin Capulong for The New York Times)

MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare.

A year later, the inquiry into those deaths has become a cross-species murder mystery, a trail of hundreds of deaths across one-third of the Indian River estuary, one of the richest marine ecosystems in the continental United States.

Along 50 miles of northern estuary waters off Brevard County and the Kennedy space complex, about 280 manatees have died in the last 12 months, 109 of them in the same sudden manner as the Banana River victims. As the manatee deaths peaked this spring, hundreds of pelicans began dying along the same stretch of water, followed this summer by scores of bottlenose dolphins.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY  ON THE NEW YORK TIMES