{"id":349079,"date":"2025-12-21T12:34:55","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T17:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cltampa.com\/?p=349079"},"modified":"2025-12-21T12:35:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T17:35:00","slug":"away-in-a-mangrove-there-are-reminders-that-if-we-help-it-boca-ciega-bay-can-heal-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cltampa.com\/news\/away-in-a-mangrove-there-are-reminders-that-if-we-help-it-boca-ciega-bay-can-heal-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Away in a mangrove, there are reminders that if we help it, Boca Ciega Bay can heal itself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Wake form passing boats at Eckerd College in Clearwater, Florida. Credit:<\/span> Amanda Hagood \/ Creative Loafing Tampa Bay<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a gorgeous December afternoon along the shores of Boca Ciega Bay. I\u2019m standing at the southern edge of Eckerd College campus, where Frenchman\u2019s Creek drains into the bay, watching sunshine glitter off the wake of passing boats and sift through the dense clump of mangroves at Maximo Point, just across the channel. I\u2019m waiting for my friend Tyler, who directs Eckerd\u2019s coastal management program and has promised to show me around the College\u2019s new living shoreline installation, a grouping of plants and riprap meant to protect this erosion-prone section of its coastline. Snatches of students\u2019 conversations in the nearby dog park drift by: a killer chemistry exam, roommate drama, plans for the upcoming break. The sun beats down and I peel off my jean jacket; by the time Tyler arrives, I\u2019ve started to sweat. Even after 11 years, I\u2019m still not quite used to Christmastime in Florida. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night before, we\u2019d put up our tree: the six-and-a-half feet, prelit, made-in-China ersatz evergreen we\u2019ve affectionately dubbed \u201cWesley Spruce\u201d after the name printed on the box. (It\u2019s worth noting that there is no such species as a Wesley Spruce. This is apparently a marketing name created by Christmas tree manufacturers to designate a particularly lush and lifelike type of artificial tree). I\u2019ll admit, I have mixed feelings about using an artificial tree; growing up, I relished the yearly trip to the tree lot, the delightful man-versus-tree wrestling match between my dad and our chosen conifer that inevitably followed, and the sweet green smell of fir that would fill the living room all season. I also know that, by the time you balance the plastics, the carbon footprint of shipping millions of artificial trees around the world, and the carbon mitigation provided by all those Christmas tree farms, you really should just buy a live tree. It\u2019s what real treehuggers do. And yet, our family has been ringing in the holidays with our scraggly, smells-like-attic Wesley Spruce since 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, of course, there\u2019s more to the story. Christmas 2014 was the first one we\u2019d spent in the house my husband and I had bought together. I had just left a good job that had gone sour, and was moping anchorless and miserable through bright December days that felt like an affront to my sad state of mind. Wesley caught our eye on a routine trip to Home Depot; we needed a tree, and I think my husband knew it might cheer me up a bit. So we brought Wesley home, patiently unpacking and stacking his octopus-like tiers, tenderly untangling and fluffing his feathery-plastic boughs, and covering him with two boxes worth of gold balls\u2014all the ornaments we had at the time. Since then, Wesley\u2019s finery has grown: my tarnished silver First Christmas \u201882 bell (still plays \u201cJoy to the World\u201d if you wind it up enough), my husband\u2019s collection of owl ornaments, and all manner of painted and googly-eyed creations produced by our son over the years. We deck Wesley out, plug him in, and, every time, there it is\u2014that sentimental catch in my throat that means the Christmas season has officially begun. An awkward beginning turned strangely lovely. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Living shoreline signage at Eckerd College in Clearwater, Florida. Credit:<\/span> Amanda Hagood \/ Creative Loafing Tampa Bay<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Looking around me, I could say the same about the living shoreline. As we wade into waist-high spartina grass, I\u2019m amazed by what I see. Just 16 months before, one broiling August afternoon, I had stood in this very spot, helping a throng of Eckerd students and staff plant grasses and shrubs in a patch of raw, sandy soil. Dodging shovel-swings and flying sand, I\u2019d eased spartina and muhly grass plants from their pots, chatting with my planting partner about her first semester in college. We\u2019d made a little game of wishing each plant luck as we patted it into the ground. When we finished and stepped back for a drink of water, it didn\u2019t look like anything so grand as a living shoreline; it looked like a phalanx of ragged recruits, transfer-shocked plants stationed across 400 feet of bare soil. If I had understood the drubbing those little plants were to face in the next two months with the arrivals of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, I might have wished them more than luck. Parts of the installation had to be completely replanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But now, the picture is altogether different. Up and down stream, marsh grasses grow in wild profusion, slender stalks swept this way and that like tousled hair. They slope gently down to the water, sheltering gray-green tufts of salt bush, fiery splotches of blanketflower, and, right along the edge, scrappy stalks of red mangrove. Along the shaved-down remnant of the seawall\u2014all that remains of a structure that had armored Eckerd\u2019s shoreline for decades\u2014Tyler finds new patches of oysters growing. And these aren\u2019t the only signs of life: we find narrow wildlife trails winding through the grass and the delicate footprints of raccoon and possum along the low tide line. We also find slightly broader paths cut by students\u2014known in the restoration business as \u201csocial trails\u201d\u2014down to the riprap, a prime fishing spot. And, wedged in the watery hole between the boulders and the old wall, one punchy little crab. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A crab between riprap and an old seawall at Eckerd College in Clearwater, Florida. Credit:<\/span> Amanda Hagood \/ Creative Loafing Tampa Bay<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our campus, like so many other waterfront properties on Tampa Bay, is reckoning with the long term impacts of the dredge and fill craze that swept this part of Florida in the 1940s-1960s\u2014the construction boom that brought ecological disaster to Boca Ciega Bay and became, as former State Representative Roger Wilson told Tampa Bay Newspapers <\/em>in 2019, \u201ca national representation of how not to dredge and fill.\u201d  By some estimates, as much as a quarter of the bay bottom of Boca Ciega was scraped up and piled into finger islands, destroying seagrass meadows and mangrove banks that had once nourished one of the most productive estuaries in Florida. Add to this the runoff and sewage that followed from all that development, it\u2019s no surprise that  environmentalists declared Tampa Bay \u201cdead\u201d by the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at old aerial photographs in the College archives, you can\u2019t help but notice the startling fact that the western third of our campus did not exist\u2014at least not as land\u2014before the late 1960s. (Fun fact: the Ratner Fill project, which completed our campus and also laid the groundwork for neighboring Isla del Sol, helped spark the controversy which led to Zabel v. Tabb, a court ruling that called for the Army Corps of Engineers to take the cumulative effects of any dredging project into consideration when granting permits. It helped spell the end of the dredge and fill era.) The miles of sea wall that hold all that dredged land in place are now fighting a losing battle with time, tide, and sea level rise, all of which gradually erode and undermine them. It\u2019s a common sight in the Tampa Bay area: places where land behind a seawall has subsided into ankle-twisting gaps and holes, where the concrete has begun to buckle and crack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A 1959 aerial photo of Eckerd College in Clearwater, Florida. Credit:<\/span> c\/o Eckerd College<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Living shorelines are promoted as a \u201cgreen infrastructure\u201d alternative to this overabundance of concrete that works on multiple levels: they absorb the wave energy that causes erosion, while creating habitat for wildlife\u2014or in many cases, restoring lost habitat. They also scrub runoff headed into the bay, removing pollutants and improving the water quality that is so important for seagrass meadows and all the species they support. Where dredge and fill degraded the estuary, living shorelines repair, bit by bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve wandered now to the end of the installation, where the cordgrass peters out into the shade of trees and the sidewalk curves away to the west. I start to thank Tyler for his time, but then he points out something interesting: the seawall keeps going, curving along the imposing wall of mangroves that shield the southernmost tip of the campus. As many times as I\u2019ve walked (or even paddled) this quarter mile stretch of the shore, I never once noticed the old sea wall. And it\u2019s easy to see why: red, black, and white mangroves all grow here, sheltering in their deep green shadows beach shrubs, vines, and fiddler crabs. In some places, sand has accumulated so deep that palm trees grow, and every once in a while, the vast mangrove hedge breaks to form a tiny secret beach. The seawall runs just landward of this hidden world, in some places a sizable hop above it, in others just barely visible above the soil. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m momentarily bewildered. This isn\u2019t what seawalls are supposed to do. Seawalls cut a clear, immaculate line between land and water; they let us roll our carpets of sand or sod right up to the edge of the bay and dangle our toes over; they slice through the map to turn nature\u2019s messy edges into precise geometric shapes. But this seawall is\u2026not doing that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tyler sees the question on my face. It\u2019s all about wave energy, he explains. Back at the living shoreline, boats coming into the creek cut their engines at the \u201cNo Wake\u201d channel marker, ironically sending a surge of wake toward the encroaching banks of the creek. I\u2019d seen that clearly enough when we were there; every time a boat passed, wavelets churned up, crashing into the old sea wall and bouncing back. Over time, this rough movement gouges out the sediment in front of the seawall, making it difficult for anything to grow. But at this point on the wall, the shifting sands slowed down, accumulated, transformed into the floor of a mangrove forest. Why? Tyler points out into the bay, where the emerald hump of Indian Key, an undeveloped mangrove island, rises out of the water just a third of a mile away. It\u2019s possible, he says, that the key sheltered this part of the wall from the wind and waves, letting the sand settle and mangroves take root\u2014an accidental forest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A hidden beach at Eckerd College in Clearwater, Florida. Credit:<\/span> Amanda Hagood \/ Creative Loafing Tampa Bay<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My mind jumps back to our Christmas tree in all its synthetic glory. What makes it lovely, I decide, is not its perfect imitation of nature (no matter how \u201cWesley Spruce\u201d it may be). Instead, it\u2019s the way it catches and holds our memories\u2014the bells, owls, and other flotsam borne in on the tide of our life together\u2014like a tidal flat transformed into a hidden beach. To fully appreciate it requires a firsthand understanding of our family\u2019s history, the auld lang syne we\u2019re always singing about this time of year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same way, living shorelines complicate a simple understanding of \u201cnature\u201d versus \u201cmanmade.\u201d They aren\u2019t just about replacing the unnatural hardscaping laid down by generations past with something greener, something prettier\u2014after all, living shorelines are also engineered by human hands (as the blisters on my thumbs that not-to-long-ago August day will attest). And, as much good as they can do for slowing erosion, enhancing habitat, and improving water quality, they\u2019re not just about bringing those benefits to any one site. At heart, living shorelines require an understanding of the complex, unique-to-every-installation agencies of water, wind, sediment, plants, and animals; they require us to see how one location is connected to the others around it, to think\u2014with apologies to Aldo Leopold<\/a>\u2014not like a mountain, but like an estuary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve zoned out. Tyler\u2019s probably wondering what\u2019s wrong with me, but it\u2019s just sweet visions of oyster reefs dancing in my head. You can keep your Frosty snowmen and winter wonderlands, I\u2019ve found my Florida Christmas groove. It\u2019s Oyster the World, Away in a Mangrove, The Nutcracker Marshgrass: the pretty darn miraculous way the bay can heal itself, if we help it. <\/p>\n\n\n\t\t

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Dr. Amanda Hagood is Instructor in Animal Studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida where she also teaches courses in Environmental Humanities.<\/p>\n

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