Yellow-Green Peril

From Boca Grande to Naples, a terrible smell hung over Florida's west coast. On the sandy beaches, or tangled in mangrove swamps, lay millions of big & little dead fish, eels, crabs, scallops. Natives and visitors (including Coalmaster John L. Lewis) held their offended noses. So many tourists began hurrying home that the nervous Lee County Chamber of Commerce wired Washington (the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service) for help and advice. Last week Army airplanes were spraying the masses of decomposing fish with DDT to prevent a threatened fly plague.

The trouble started early last month. Cartoonist J. N. ("Ding") Darling (an ex-Government Wildlife man) found the beach near his Captiva home strewn with dead fish. More were floating offshore, belly-up, and the water was heavily laced with sickly yellow-green streaks.

All up & down the coast it was the same story. A fishing boat with a well built into its hull to keep its catch alive steered into one of the streaks. As soon as the yellow-green water got into the well, the captive fish swam to the surface, gulping air. Then they were as dead as their uncaught fellows outside.

Rumors flew fast and wild. Was it a subterranean eruption fouling the Gulf with sulphurous poisons? Darling examined samples of the water under a low-powered microscope. He reported that the water seemed full of "waltzing mice": thousands of fast-moving organisms which "seem to accomplish their swimming by a whirling motion." He made sketches and sent them to Washington.

The tentative diagnosis, from Fish & Wildlife's Dr. Paul S. Galtsoff: Florida's affliction, though rare and annoying, was nothing new. In various parts of the world, sea water is occasionally poisoned by "very rapid reproduction of unicellular organisms of the group of Dinoflagellates." California, Florida was happy to learn, has had the same trouble. Japan's pearl oysters have also suffered from the destructive Dinoflagellates.

No one could describe exactly how the swarming organisms kill sea life. Perhaps they actually poison the fish; perhaps they suffocate fish by blocking their gills. But there is no quick remedy. This week dead fish, but fewer of them, were still coming ashore. The only thing Florida chambers of commerce could do was hope that the next cold snap would clear the sea of yellow-green streaks.

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