Skidaway Island — For 20 years, a scientist near Savannah has taken weekly water samples from the same dock, giving him a composite snapshot of the estuary's health. Pieced together, the view goes from good to fair, and getting worse. Peter Verity's data tells him the estuary — where rivers wrestle with the sea — is in trouble.
Dissolved oxygen, the breath of life for shrimp, blue crabs, oysters and fish, is declining at an alarming rate. Within 10 years, Verity, a professor at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, predicts there won't be enough left for the sea life we love to eat. Those creatures will be replaced by jellyfish, which don't need as much dissolved oxygen and feed on the type of organisms that grow in a polluted estuary, he says.
Verity's already witnessed change. Between 1987 and 2000, his sampling showed a 70 percent increase in jellyfish. Verity and other scientists who have researched similar changes worldwide say they can sum up the cause in a single word: people.
As more homes, condominiums, marinas and businesses are built on the coast, pollution increases in tidal creeks and estuaries. Treated sewage discharges and stormwater runoff carry fertilizers from lawns, golf courses and farms and oil and other pollutants from pavement and rooftops. "We need to stop what we're doing now and either mitigate or reduce
because we're going downhill in a hurry," Verity said.
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