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UNSEEN ENEMY

It’s invisible, but the mercury assault on the Everglades is beginning to have visible effects on wildlife and human beings.



 

ON ANY GIVEN DAY, STRAIGHT-LINE CANALS flanking narrow roads that thread the Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park host scores of pole fishers.

Shore-bound or boat-mounted, they hoist both pleasure and supper from dark waters often visibly pocked with alligators and adorned with attendant wading birds. Human and other animals have foraged here through 5,000 years of seasons wet and dry, hunting and fishing in a slow-motion water world sliding eternally south, from the big fresh splash of Lake Okeechobee to the fecund salt shallows of Florida Bay.

But nowadays, if they regularly eat what they catch — often the case with people and always the case with birds and beasts — they risk mercury poisoning.

Converted or “methylated” by microbes in the soil from an inorganic, passive form to a dangerous active toxin, mercury (Hg) now exists as methylmercury (MeHg) in more than half of fish and wildlife in the Everglades region, scientists have shown.

Big Cypress pole fishers reel in their catches. Forget catch and release — anglers here traditionally hope to hook fish to eat. ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Big Cypress pole fishers reel in their catches. Forget catch and release — anglers here traditionally hope to hook fish to eat. ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

They also have identified the most dominant of several factors in the making of methylmercury: sulfate, emerging from sulfur fertilizers spread across aerated soil to grow sugar cane.

MeHg in fish — methylmercury — is nothing to trivialize or ignore.

Both elected officials and resource managers have known about it for several decades, and they know how they could reduce it significantly within a few years. But they haven’t and aren’t, according to research scientists who point to data and evidence, and offer solutions in a new book: “Mercury and the Everglades: A Synthesis and Model for Complex Ecosystem Restoration.”

Instead, officials studiously ignore the solution while talking about the complex factors in the problem, says Dr. Darren Rumbold, director of the Coastal Watershed Institute and professor of Marine Science at Florida Gulf Coast University. A co-author of the book and former research scientist for the South Florida Water Management District, he’s studied the mercury problem for most of two decades.

Filling the cooler with oscars.

Filling the cooler with oscars.

“We did the book partly to help resource managers and officials make informed decisions, and partly to determine why the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) hasn’t done anything for almost a decade,” he explained. The book also suggests what they could have and should have done in that period.

Fried in cornmeal and methylmercury

Meanwhile, pole fishers in or near the ’Glades continue stuffing buckets or coolers to the brim with various species of catfish, sunfish, cichlids and others both native and exotic, including the top piscine predators in freshwater, largemouth bass.

“We call it ditch fishing. On a good day we can get about 200 along here,” said Bill Spiess, who joined three mid-March companions with light spinning rods to pull Oscars — cichlids the size of salad plates native to the Amazon — from holes in mats of water lettuce. The green-leafed mats floated here and there atop a miles-long, north-south canal in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, near the junction of U.S. 41 (the Tamiami Trail) and State Road 29 in Collier County.

RUMBOLD

RUMBOLD

Around him, the Big Cypress and the Everglades stretched beyond the horizon, a world heritage wetland unique on the planet, splashed in sunlight, humbling in its vast, seemingly immutable stillness. Along the canal in both directions others could also be seen fishing.

What couldn’t be seen: the invisible settling of airborne mercury mostly from poorly regulated industries outside U.S. borders, and from forest fires and volcanoes — all of it inorganic upon arrival, but soon coupled in a bad marriage of sorts with sulfate.

A transitioned form of sulfur running off agricultural fields, sulfate is now identified as a compelling factor in the creation of methylmercury, a fact about which there is little disagreement.

SPIESS

SPIESS

The conflicts arise, instead, over what to do about it.

None of this seems to concern Mr. Spiess, who merely shrugs when he hears of it.

“I ask them at home how many fish they want — that’s going to be how many they’re willing to clean for the freezer,” he said. “We try not to bring back more than that.”

This isn’t catch-and-release country for the many who never entered a bass tournament with all its bells and whistles — the fancy boats, fish-finding radar, gear sponsors and big money.

On the contrary, this is catch, collect, clean and fill-a-freezer country. The fileted freezer fish will end up battered in cornmeal, fried golden and plated as the centerpiece of many meals.

Unfortunately, that could have potentially devastating consequences for fishers and eaters in or near the Everglades.

Veiled toxic terrorist

The deadly effects of methylmercury are less visible than others — death by automobile for panthers and countless other critters, for example.

Florida panthers continue to be found with high levels of mercury. COURTESY PHOTO / MARK CUNNINGHAM, FFWCC

Florida panthers continue to be found with high levels of mercury. COURTESY PHOTO / MARK CUNNINGHAM, FFWCC

Bodies don’t pile up on the side of the road.

Instead, as methylmercury biomagnifies in creatures up the food chain, it deposits the highest concentrations in more dominant predators: wading birds relying on fish as the only item ever on the menu. Dolphins and blacktip sharks in the Shark River basin that carry among the highest concentrations of methylmercury in the world. Even invasive pythons. FDEP researchers are now determining if mercury in the destructive reptiles will prevent them from becoming a plentiful, protein-rich food source.

Humans stand at the top of this food chain, whose mercury victims may not look like it at a glance.

“We should not expect to see acute death resulting from exposure to this neurotoxin in either humans or wildlife,” explained Dr. Rumbold.

“But sub-lethal effects could impact humans: for example, reduced I.Q., deficits in language, attention, motor function, memory.”

LANGE

LANGE

Wildlife could be left “at a competitive disadvantage,” he added: “unable to find food, causing malnutrition, having increased susceptibility to disease, depressed reproduction, or at an increased risk of predation.”

People who have suffered mercury poisoning after eating affected fish or game describe the feeling as similar to a hangover — a perpetual “fog,” they say.

Ted Lange, a senior wildlife biologist in Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (the FWC) who contributed to the book, may have witnessed the results of such a condition directly.

“Florida panther No. 27 was a female who died impaled on a stick,” he recalled. “I analyzed the liver and it had 110 parts per million of mercury, really high. No one knew what level would kill a panther, and it’s debatable whether mercury killed that panther or not.”

But he was startled.

“Here’s what we could say: It was a toxicologically significant level of mercury in a wild animal.”

Researchers collect egret feathers to monitor mercury levels in wading birds. SFWMD

Researchers collect egret feathers to monitor mercury levels in wading birds. SFWMD

No other panthers have ever been reported impaled on sticks.

Setting the stage

For millennia, mammals here, more than 40 species, including dolphins, panthers, bears, otters, Everglades minks and raccoons have joined humans, birds, reptiles and amphibians to form a food chain extravagantly endowed with prey. Each creature and every species remains as dependent on others as the endless ethereal sky lying belly to belly with the vast wet earth of the flat southern peninsula. Sky and the floral Earth are wed in their own dependent communion.

That isn’t new news and neither is this: For almost 40 years, people have understood that creatures in this food chain remain under assault from mercury that far exceeds the natural levels inherent in the continent’s single greatest wetland.

It drifts in from the atmosphere, scientists say, once a product of industries in the United States including Florida, but now — following the Clean Air Act of 1993 that put a halt to much of that — mostly a consequence of poorly regulated industries elsewhere: waste incinerators, coal-fired utilities, gold and silver mines, smelting operations, cement kilns and natural events such as forest fires in the Brazilian rain forest or volcanoes in Africa, Europe, Russia, Asia, South America, the South Pacific, Iceland and the United States, just this century.

Bill Orem, a chemist and principal investigator for the USGS, sampling methylmercury contamination. COURTESY PHOTO

Bill Orem, a chemist and principal investigator for the USGS, sampling methylmercury contamination. COURTESY PHOTO

The planet is now suffering from an invisible deluge, which might not matter as much if the mercury remained inert.

But it hasn’t, here.

Here, Lake Okeechobee lies cradled by more than 700,000 acres of the Everglades Agricultural Area, scraped out, pumped out and maintained for farmers in part by both the federal government beginning in 1948, and the state.

Here, sulfur is a key fertilizer essential to high crop yields, especially of sugar cane. Cane covers roughly 415,000 acres of the EAA. It requires between 100 and 500 pounds per acre of elemental sulfur, usually fed into furrows by farmers before planting every three or four years, says Dr. Mabry McCray, a University of Florida soil scientist in the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), a university division devoted to helping farmers.

State Health Department officials in Martin County created a cookbook in 2011 after discovering from hair samples that women who regularly ate local fish there had the highest mercury levels in the state or nation.

State Health Department officials in Martin County created a cookbook in 2011 after discovering from hair samples that women who regularly ate local fish there had the highest mercury levels in the state or nation.

What if farmers had to cut their use of sulfur by 90% or more to stop mercury methylation, as modeling suggests would work?

Dr. McCray was unable to suggest an alternative.

“That’s the major tool growers use on sugar cane — some sulfur is used for other crops, too,” he said, before questioning the notion that sulfur fertilizer is the problem in the first place.

“The thing about it is, it’s not accomplishing anything to take elemental sulfur away at the rates used now. More sulfate is coming from mineralization of organic soils than you’re getting from elemental sulfur.”

The mineralization, he said, occurs in part because soils in the EAA have thinned in the last 20 years, and they lie atop limestone. The limestone contains sulfur. As a result of that and other factors, “when soils are aerated, you get mineralization that releases nitrogen, some phosphorus (and additional nutrients). That mineralization also releases sulfate. So you’re getting more from that than you get from elemental sulfur.”

OSCEOLA

OSCEOLA

How it works

Dr. Bill Orem, a research chemist and principal investigator with the Geology, Energy & Minerals Science Center of the USGS based in Reston, Virginia — the United States Geological Survey — has studied the sulfur-mercury connection in the Everglades and wetlands elsewhere for three decades. He also contributed to the book. He points to research data that indisputably connects sulfur used in EAA agriculture, and surface water sulfate that creates methylmercury in the EAA and the ’Glades.

By nature, sulfate levels in the Everglades have traditionally amounted to less than one milligram per liter of water, he said — “but about 60% of the Everglades now has surface water sulfate concentrations exceeding that.”

POLLMAN

POLLMAN

Exceeding it by how much?

“Highly sulfate-enriched marshes in the northern Everglades have average sulfate levels of 60 milligrams per liter (60 mg/L), and the highest concentrations of sulfate, averaging 60 to 70 mg/L, are in canal water in the Everglades Agricultural Area.”

Here’s how it happens in broad terms: To grow cane in the dense peat that characterizes traditional ’Glades soil, farmers drain the fields and open the soil to the air, causing mineralization, including the making of some sulfate. They lay down elemental sulfur as fertilizer to acidify the soil, and to help release phosphorus and other plant nutrients.

“Elemental sulfur oxidizes to sulfate. Sulfate from all this washes off the fields when it rains — it’s a salt — and it gets into canals and is discharged into the ecosystem,” Dr. Orem explained.

More than half of fish and wildlife in the Everglades system are now affected by toxic methylmercury (MeHg), scientists have shown. COURTESY PHOTO

More than half of fish and wildlife in the Everglades system are now affected by toxic methylmercury (MeHg), scientists have shown. COURTESY PHOTO

Once there, it not only stimulates methylmercury production, “it can be used by bacteria that convert sulfate to sulfide.”

And sulfide is its own potential problem, depending on its quantity.

He compares the process to internal combustion in motor vehicles. Gasoline is broken down or combusted to create energy, just as sulfur from the farm fields is broken down for energy by specialized microorganisms in the aerated soil, creating sulfate. The waste product in engines is carbon dioxide; in soil, the waste from sulfate is sulfide, itself highly toxic.

In high enough quantities, sulfide can inhibit or halt the methylation process in mercury, which raises a question: Why not add even more elemental sulfur to the system, ultimately suffocating the mercury problem by drowning it in sulfide?

“That’s been proposed in the past,” said Dr. Orem, “but sulfide itself is extremely toxic, like carbon dioxide is in gasoline engines. So, no.”

 

As for the amount of sulfur farmers use these days to grow cane, “Mabry’s right — and a lot of IFAS people defend the amount of sulfur they’re using by pointing out that only 25% of the total sulfur coming out of the EAA is produced by (sulfur fertilizer),” Dr. Orem said. “It’s true that oxidation of the soil, aerating it, is a bigger source. But here’s the thing: Oxidation is caused by agriculture, just like legacy sulfur. Agriculture in the past and present adds sulfur and aerates the soil, (creating) sulfate in the Everglades.”

From those facts he draws this conclusion: “Sulfate loading to the Everglades is principally a result of land and water management in South Florida.”

The MeHg resulting from such sulfate loading isn’t the elemental mercury baby boomers played with, the stuff they watched rise as silver bars in pencil-thin glass tubes every time their mothers shoved thermometers under their tongues.

The Everglades Protection Area defined by the Everglades Forever Act, passed in 1994, comprises four Water Conservation Areas, or WCAs, along with Everglades National Park, the Florida Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida Bay and such water bodies or estuaries as Biscayne Bay, Lake Okeechobee, the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, The Indian River Lagoon, the Shark River Slough, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park and the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. The WCAs are: WCA 1 (the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge), 2A, 2B, 3A and 3B. COURTESY IMAGE / FRANK S. RAZEM

The Everglades Protection Area defined by the Everglades Forever Act, passed in 1994, comprises four Water Conservation Areas, or WCAs, along with Everglades National Park, the Florida Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida Bay and such water bodies or estuaries as Biscayne Bay, Lake Okeechobee, the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, The Indian River Lagoon, the Shark River Slough, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park and the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. The WCAs are: WCA 1 (the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge), 2A, 2B, 3A and 3B. COURTESY IMAGE / FRANK S. RAZEM

Instead, it’s as invisible and debilitating in elevated quantities as a terrible virus, but more insidious and slower to work.

People

The problem became so worrisome in Martin County that Department of Health researchers in 2010 looked at mercury concentrated in hair samples of more than 400 women of childbearing age, 18 to 49. Those women who regularly ate local fish had the highest concentrations known to exist in Florida or the United States, they learned, suggesting the need both for education and “region-specific fish consumption advisories to minimize mercury exposure.”

That was a start at protecting people, but not at solving the problem at its root.

“The health effects of mercury in humans are mostly on the developing nervous system,” the report noted. “Pregnant women and women who are breastfeeding must be targeted in order to decrease mercury exposure to the populations at highest risk —infants, unborn children and fetuses.”

AXELRAD

AXELRAD

Renay Rouse, an FDOH spokeswoman in Martin County, was there at the time. “The study was done, samples were taken, education done,” she recalled. “We put together an educational recipe book. It was popular. It told people what are the choices for fish, to lower the mercury risk.”

When the FDOH did a follow-up study in December 2016, however, “we couldn’t get all the women in the first study,” Ms. Rouse said.

In fact, they found only 17 women from the first study, too few to draw conclusions about eventual consequences. But they completed enough research to advise people to limit their meals from some saltwater or freshwater supermarket fish, too.

The methylmercury question in Martin County was finally superseded by other Department of Health challenges, then put on the back burner.

But it hasn’t gone away. Some locations and fish species are more dangerous than others, so the Florida DOH maintains online advisories for lakes, streams and canals in each county, warning people to eat only some or none of many species of fish (along with frogs and alligators) found in the ’Glades.

JULIAN

JULIAN

“We have about 450 water bodies in Florida with fish consumptions advisories,” noted Mr. Lange, the FWC wildlife biologist, suggesting that the problem is widespread. And various agencies have confronted it.

“The Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) has funded the analytical side, the FWC then does collections and maintains data, and the DOH does advisories.”

That’s far from enough, the researchers insist, and Mr. Lange agrees. “We are not going to see any changes in levels of mercury in fish and wildlife in the ’Glades under status quo conditions,” he concluded.

Members of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes native to the region continued to rely on fish and wildlife from the Everglades until they became aware of the dangers. And now, said Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee elder, “I advise my family members to not eat fish at all. When I was little we ate fish every day. But our people don’t fish as much now because of the danger. We only do it on special occasions,” including a coming spring ceremony for which tribal members are now preparing by catching and freezing fish, she added.

Dr. J. Mabry McCray is a soil scientist specializing in sugarcane nutrition at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). COURTESY PHOTO

Dr. J. Mabry McCray is a soil scientist specializing in sugarcane nutrition at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). COURTESY PHOTO

And it isn’t just fish, for the tribes. The Seminoles did a study in 2016 with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency looking at their traditional (and sometimes still current) food sources in the Big Cypress and Brighton reservations of Hendry and Glades counties.

The results weren’t pretty. They identified methylmercury as the single most significant threat.

In the words of the 72-page report:

“A total of forty-four samples originating from fish (35 samples), Alligator (4 samples), Turtles (2 samples) and Bear (3 samples) were tested for twentysix contaminants of concern.

 

“These twenty-six contaminants all had screening values established with the intent of protecting human health by means of consumption. The study resulted in numerous exceedances of various tissue types for the prescribed contaminants. Thirty-five of forty-four samples had exceedances for methylmercury.

Furthermore, methylmercury was detected in all but one sample during this study.”

A form of arsenic was the second most prevalent contaminant.

And now, for example, “we see skinny alligators, emaciated alligators, alligators with cataracts,” said Ms. Osceola, who runs an airboat operation.

“We didn’t used to see that. There’s something in the water.”

The learning curve

We know where the mercury comes from. We also know how methylation occurs. And at the very least — modeling suggests it could be accomplished in a few years —we know how to significantly inhibit the creation of methylmercury and reduce its threat to humans and creatures, the research scientists say.

Their book, “Mercury in the Everglades,” finally and exhaustively synthesizes older and new research to demonstrate an unmistakable connection: a prominent fertilizer in agriculture here — sulfur — enters surface waters in significant quantities to adversely affect life and its balance in a mercury-infused water system, in this case the Everglades, but anywhere else with similar conditions.

In its sulfate form, we know, it becomes a primary catalyst in the conversion of inorganic mercury — mercury arriving mostly from the atmosphere — into dangerous methylmercury.

Suspecting that was one thing. Demonstrating it beyond a doubt with data and science was another.

“When it was first understood there were problems, we went into a flurry of effort,” recalls Dr. Curtis Pollman, CEO and chief scientist at Aqua Lux Lucis Inc., based in Gainesville, a co-author of the book whose company does “modeling and analysis of environmental data to help inform environmental policy.” Like his colleagues, he spent years confronting the problem by studying and reporting it.

“What happened at that point was roughly 20 years of mercury research designed to look at a multitude of issues — everything from where does the mercury come from, to what forms come in from the sky, in what concentrations, what are biogeochemical factors, and what factors drive methylation.”

Over time, scientists began to recognize the outlines of the threat.

“For the mercury problem to exist, we learned, several things have to fall into place. One, we need a source of mercury.

“Two, it needs to be converted by a methylation process into a form biota (animal and plant life) can pick up.

“And three, once the mercury is methylated, there will be damage. As it accumulates in the food chain, it accumulates in levels of risk to humans and others.”

That’s why Dr. Orem insists that “methylmercury in the Everglades is a bigger problem than phosphorous ever was.

“Phosphorous affects about 15% to 20% of the ecosystem. But sulfate, and methylmercury, affects 60% of the system.”

Like phosphorous, he explained, sulfur enters the STAs or Stormwater Treatment Areas designed to hold and filter water, cleaning it to some extent before sending it on.

But unlike phosphorous, it overwhelms the system.

“The STAs do a great job removing phosphorous,” Dr. Orem said, “but not as good a job with sulfur. It’s too big a load, the milligrams per liter is too big a load.”

Stopping the problem — or not

There are two ways to eradicate mercury pollution and its threat, the scientists say: one, to halt or reduce “atmospheric deposition” of mercury, a worldwide problem.

But that’s not a quick process. Modeling shows it’s unlikely to happen until the end of the 21st century, at the earliest.

The other way is a lot quicker and a lot less popular. By managing and greatly reducing sulfur used in agriculture to about 10% of its current level, methylmercury in and around the Everglades could be significantly lessened in “the near term” — a few years.

In Dr. Orem’s estimation, if everybody worked together, farmers could carry on raising crops in the EAA while coincidentally methylmercury could be mostly eradicated.

That would take three things: “a multifaceted approach employing best management practices for sulfur in agriculture; agricultural practices that minimize soil oxidation; and changes to Stormwater Treatment Areas that increase sulfate retention, and could help reduce sulfate loads to the Everglades, with resulting benefits.”

But there’s a problem, says Dr. Rumbold, who echoes the sentiments of his co-authors and editors, Dr. Pollman and Dr. Don Axelrad, a former DEP scientist and now assistant professor in the Institute of Public Health at Florida A&M University.

The problem: State researchers from the FDEP and the SFWMD who advise elected officials have errantly reported that environmental factors influencing methylmercury production are too complex to solve merely by reducing sulfur and its product, sulfate, in surface waters running off agricultural fields.

Instead, they say that more research is needed before any official action is taken.

“Sulfate is of concern due to its ability under some circumstances to influence biogeochemical processes that lead to mercury methylation,” acknowledged Dr. Paul Julian, until recently one of those researchers, in the 2021 South Florida Environmental Report submitted March 1 to Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislators.

In the chapter he and his colleagues wrote, called “Mercury and Sulfur Environmental Assessment for the Everglades,” Dr. Julian also suggested that we don’t know enough yet to act.

“The exact quantitative role that sulfate plays in the sulfur-mercury biogeochemical cycle in Everglades marshes is still not clear; biogeochemical cycling of mercury within the Everglades is confounded by many variables, particularly food web dynamics, soil microbial community dynamics, water quality and hydrological conditions.

“Therefore,” he added, “its role in the mercury problem remains uncertain.”

In a phone conversation and an email, he elaborated.

“Atmospheric deposition is the only source of mercury in Florida.

“Once it’s in the Everglades, or wetlands in general, mercury gets methylated. How depends on the system, and there’s a battle between two groups: some say it’s sulfur, some not. It’s not just one thing and we’re done.”

Should we remove sulfur from the system since research has shown its detrimental effect in the Everglades?

“Some people say that — but it’s variable,” Dr. Julian responded. “There is no quick fix.”

Should there be extensive control of sulfate and sulfur now?

“It would probably be a good idea,” he acknowledged. “But it could shift the problem from one area to another. If we cut off sulfate now, where the effect is, is going to change. So it’s not just as simple as we shut off sulfate and everything will be fine.”

Finally, he concluded, “I’m not an advocate for either position (suddenly reducing sulfur use, or leaving the issue alone and not reducing it) because the issue is so complex. We monitor mercury annually in the Everglades. It’s not like we’re not trying to figure it out.”

Controversy

Dr. Julian’s contribution to the 2021 South Florida Environmental Report to legislators was his last as the Everglades Technical Lead in the FDEP Office of Ecosystem Projects, where he worked almost 10 years. Last month, he resigned to accept a new position as a hydrologic modeler working jointly for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation.

Dr. Axelrad, who spent a decade with the FDEP writing similar though perhaps less popular reports for legislators, echoed Dr. Rumbold’s notion that not figuring it out is precisely what officials are now doing.

“The three volumes of our book came out in 2019 and 2020,” Dr. Axelrad said. “There was plenty of scope. Our science contradicts their science, and theirs is scientifically unacceptable — it’s science designed to please special interests,” he said.

“There are two broad issues: Fish have too much mercury for women of child-bearing age to eat, and some wildlife is way overexposed, because it has no option to eat but fish.

“Why do mercury and fish have a relationship?

“Because of biogeochemistry: what the ecosystem does to mercury. It changes plain old mercury to methylmercury. That bioaccumulates up the food chain. Inorganic mercury does not.

“So what promotes methylmercury in the ecosystem? Sulfur, which becomes sulfate.

“Where are we getting it? Agriculture.”

Dr. Rumbold scoffs at Dr. Julian’s notion that the role of sulfate in the mercury problem remains uncertain.

“Everybody else in the world knows what role sulfate plays,” he said. “What can be upsetting is that 10 or 15 years ago we all reached consensus.”

State and federal agencies had begun to recognize what was happening.

“Based on numerous studies conducted during the 1990s, a consensus emerged that while the principal cause of the problem was the high rate of atmospheric deposition, the susceptibility of the Everglades was due to sulfate contamination that stimulated methylation of the deposited mercury,” he explained.

At that point, the SFWMD began to shape monitoring plans and lay out mitigation strategies, based on the consensus. And two federal agencies — the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — created a restoration target for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan of more than 60 projects now underway. The target: to “maintain or reduce sulfate concentrations to one part per million, or less,” in their words.

“But sulfate in the Everglades was highly controversial because its source was agriculture use of sulfur,” Dr. Rumbold said.

“The situation became even more contentious when sulfate contamination was also linked to two other longstanding environmental problems in the Everglades: phosphate cycling and cattail expansion.”

Eventually, he recalled, “officials began searching for alternative solutions to sulfate reduction. And subsequent studies have continued to support previously known co-factors, such as dissolved organic matter, playing a role in mercury methylation.”

Stuart Van Horn, bureau chief of water quality at the SFWMD, coordinates production of the annual South Florida Environmental Report to assist the DEP, he says. The job requires using roughly 100 staff members to complete each year.

Asked why the report, and Chapter 3 in particular, failed to cite the book, “Mercury and the Everglades,” he said he had only skimmed the first two volumes, but not seen the third. Dr. Julian may not have read it.

Nevertheless, he said, “There’s a huge body of evidence that sulfate is part of the process (that creates methylmercury). But now they’ve discovered these other possible forms of methylation, so if we remove sulfate, will those come in and take its place?”

In such case, he reasons, scientists and officials might have to begin wrestling with a new and unfamiliar problem.

Special interests, Buddhist detachment

By Dr. Rumbold’s calculation, the official state conclusions may come in part from research done by Db Environmental Laboratories Inc.

Based in Rockledge, the private company has contracted work for several years with the DEP, says Mr. Van Horn, but also provides research into the sulfur mercury problem for a taxing district — the Environmental Protection District of the Everglades Agricultural Area.

A farming kingdom of sorts, most of the land in the EAA is owned by giant agricultural conglomerates. Almost 60% of it lies in sugar cane, requiring significant amounts of sulfur to produce high crop yields.

Spread even just once over 415,000 acres of sugar cane soil at only the minimal amount cited by Dr. McCray — 100 pounds per acre — farmers would be adding 41.5 million pounds of elemental sulfur to the system.

Researchers at Db Environmental Labs have searched for data that would absolve sulfur of its status as prime mover of a massive toxic stress on an already beleaguered Everglades system, and found state scientists who support that effort, says Dr. Rumbold.

“After working the problem for just over a year, Dr. Julian and Db Labs, starting about 2015 or 2016 and with almost no prior experience researching mercury, rejected the conclusions of the national experts and instead focused on the uncertainties, which they used as justification for not taking any action,” he said.

Meanwhile, the sitting board of the Environmental Protection District in the EAA is chaired by Malcolm Wade, senior vice president of corporate strategy and business development for the U.S. Sugar Corporation.

The board seats other corporate farming officials, as well, including “Sonny” Stein, also a board member of the Florida Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative, and Joe M. Hilliard, a rancher and one of the first farmers to grow sugar cane in sandy soil. He “revolutionized the industry by introducing mechanical harvesting to the area through the Sugarland Harvesting Cooperative,” according to the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame.

Neither Mr. Wade at U.S. Sugar nor a lawyer in West Palm Beach named as spokesman for the Environmental Protection District, Charles Schoech, responded to emails or returned telephone calls for this story.

“Some of the best-funded research in the Everglades is trying to come up with alternatives to the sulfur issue,” Dr. Rumbold has concluded. “Db Environmental — that’s owned by Tom DeBusk — is being funded through a special taxing district directed in part by Big Sugar.”

Which raises a question: “Shouldn’t it be disclosed that contributors of research on the mercury problem listed in the state’s annual report are being funded by sugar farmers, so that peerreviewers, government officials and the public know who is generating the data?”

It’s a rhetorical question. His answer is, “Yes.”

The EAA Environmental Protection District budgets for the last two years list the following expenditures, citing the “principal” as Mr. DeBusk: $475,000 in FY 2019-2020 for sulfur mercury research in the Stormwater Treatment Areas (STAs) and Everglades; and “a total investment of $575,000 (and) a grant income or cost share of $75,000, leaving a net investment of $500,000,” in FY 2020-2021.

That’s a total of almost $1 million in a 24-month period.

For Dr. Pollman, who noted personally that his Buddhism may help him accept the imperfect relationship between science, politics, agriculture and human beings, that’s just par for the course, or perhaps fish in the canal.

“I’m a bit more detached than I used to be,” he admitted.

“But I believe passionately in the work we’ve done.

“My underlying motivation for the book was really to do good. To do something that was of service. It was harder than I anticipated.”

In doing that good work he chased a single ambition, one he shares with his colleagues.

“So it’s my hope that decision-makers will take the book and see it for what it’s worth. I have no ax to grind. But I do believe we should be making important decisions based on sound science.”

He and his colleagues conclude “Mercury and the Everglades” with these words: “We believe that the state of the science for the Everglades (mercury) problem is sufficiently robust to offer a clear path forward toward meaningful recovery. Inherent in the title, however, is not just the present state of the science (but) the future.”

They add a caveat: “Complex ecosystem restoration is meaningful only if those charged with the responsibility of managing and safeguarding this singular and irreplaceable natural treasure arise from their passivity and seize the gauntlet of appropriate action.” ¦

One response to “UNSEEN ENEMY”

  1. Rochelle Saunders says:

    Marvin Gaye called it along time ago.
    “Mercy, Mercy Me! Things ain’t what they used to be. Radiation under ground and in the sea.. Fish full of Mercury.” 😔 😟 😥

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