‘Quite terrifying’: Lifelong diver spots frightening phenomenon in the water

Started diving when I was 8 years old with my mom, so I’ve been in the water for a very long time. Greg Furstenworth has seen a lot in his life, spent underwater around the Florida Keys, but he’d never seen anything like this. I noticed the fish were spinning, and so I started taking video of that, that I really had no idea what I was looking at. Since last fall, he’s seen Stingrays moving upside down, Goliath grouper’s flailing on their sides, and dozens of other species swimming in tortured, flailing loops. Well, I mean, I’ve, I’ve said that, you know, it’s like I’m in the middle of a disaster movie and I’m that guy yelling from, you know, the mountaintop trying to get people to pay attention. State Fish and Wildlife officials and Florida’s Bonefish and Tarpon Trust have logged nearly 200 incidents with over 30 species acting this way, mostly in the Lower Keys but as far north as Miami. Yeah, this is crazy. I I I was out on a six hour charter. I had two people on the boat and we were down off a ligament vitae bank and we happened to see a fish floundering on the flats and then so we got close to them. We wanted to see if there was a problem and we could obviously tell that he was in distress. It turned out to be a sawfish, A critically endangered species that might lose four or five mature adults a year. But in just a few months, at least 27 have beached themselves or died after intense episodes of what anglers are calling the spins. So typically when we think of fish acting strangely or dying, we either think of low oxygen conditions in the water or red tide, and so we saw neither at the water school at Florida Gulf Coast University. Mike Parsons team is part of a statewide effort to solve the mystery of the spinning fish, and while Tess for most toxins have turned up empty. The most promising suspect is found living off seaweed at the bottom, a tiny critter named Gambier Discus. This is the highest we’ve seen of the gamer cells and the keys. We don’t know if it’s the main cause. The single cell algae can produce various neurotoxins and is showing up at record high levels. But it’s just one more stressor on marine life, already reeling from pollution, overfishing and off the charts ocean heat waves brought by climate change. So there’s. Concern and curiosity, I guess on could the hot, hot temperatures in the summer. ‘Cause some changes that maybe led to the fish behavior now, and we just don’t really have all the pieces together to try to link one to the other. They really have no idea what is happening. I mean, there is no concrete, conclusive proof of what is happening yet, and that is still to be determined, which is quite terrifying. It is scary, isn’t it? It is because if it continues, it’s going to be the end of this ecosystem as we know it.