Florida’s strange, malodorous malady, Karina brevis, also known as “red tide”, has returned to the central west coast of the peninsula this fall after back-to-back hurricanes with torrential rains washed all sorts of garbage and sewage into coastal waters. 

The noxious algae has shown up along the beaches and in the bays of Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota, Lee and Collier counties, or roughly from Clearwater to Naples. It’s described as being in “low” concentrations, but even at that there have been sizeable fish kills and beach goers are reporting respiratory irritation.

When red tide is at its worst, the irritants get airborne on a windy day and can be detected a mile or more inland, creating a catch in the throat and a reaction in the sinuses of those who are sensitive. There are also sometimes rafts of stinking dead fish washing up on the beaches.

Not surprisingly, this makes a whole lot of visitors unhappy with their Florida beach vacation.

From an angler’s point of view, a bad round of red tide is a whole lot worse than a ruined week. The worst sieges, which sometimes last for months, can all but wipe out an entire bay ecosystem, killing a high percentage of every gilled critter that lives there.

The last bad red tide on Tampa Bay was in 2018, when the bloom lasted from October 2017 through spring 2018. The bay had a huge slump in resident fish like trout and snook after that extended event, and there were even numerous manatees found dead as a result of breathing at the surface where the algae was thickest.

The bay had pretty much fully recovered by this year, with plenty of adult trout and snook as well as lots of redfish for those who knew where to look. But the impact of this fall’s red tide remains to be seen. So far, it’s been relatively mild, with mostly bait species rather than gamefish showing up dead on shore.

Red tide can even affect offshore species like grouper. About 10 years ago large areas of the sprawling limerock bottom area off Tarpon Springs, usually alive with black and red grouper as well as other reef species, was completely empty of fish for many months after a red tide event in the area. Fortunately, the reef species appear to migrate, and the area was pretty quickly repopulated.

Counties along the west coast, well aware of the impact of red tide on their beach oriented businesses, maintain red tide alert systems online, and if you’re planning a vacation there in the next few weeks, you can check with the county government, local vacation bureaus or with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission (https://myfwc.com/research/redtide/statewide ) to get the latest on where red tide is present and how intense it might be.

There’s currently no cure or treatment for waters affected, but scientists are becoming convinced that the intensity of the blooms is closely related to nutrient-rich runoff from land. Red tide has apparently always been here—the first Spanish explorers into Tampa Bay reported seeing it—but has become more intense as Florida has grown from a quiet rural state into a sprawling mega-metro on its way to becoming another California—though hopefully not politically.

If you’re planning a fishing trip as part of your Florida vacation, a call to guides in your target area will give you the inside scoop. Nobody wants you to catch fish more than your guide, and they assuredly don’t want to take clients out on waters where the chances of success have been ruined by red tide. Guides who rely on live bait can’t fish when red tide is present, in any case, because just a trace of the stuff in livewell water kills all their sardines and threadfins.

Bottom line is red tide is a curse that’s not going away anytime soon, and that will probably get worse as Florida continues to grow, more sewage is created and more vacant lands are gobbled up by development. The good news, I guess, is that the influx has slowed a bit, down from 1,200 new residents a day in 2022 to about 875 a day this year. Although, a couple more hurricanes and who knows . . . ?

— Frank Sargeant