CAPTIVA, Fla. — Over the past couple of weeks, massive clumps of floating algae have appeared in the waters along the eastern side of Captiva. It looks gross, and smells even worse.
"We don't smell it on Sanibel," said Steve Hungerford, visiting from Kissimmee. "But once we got here, we caught a whiff of it. It doesn't smell too good."
Hungerford and his wife were getting ready to kayak at a boat launch on Pine Island Sound on Friday, and had to first navigate through a thick layer of the foul-smelling gunk.
Down the street at the Green Flash Restaurant on the water, more of the reeking muck was floating by the restaurant's dock. The normally busy outdoor seating area was empty.
"Today, we decided not to open it," said manager Shawn Scott. "So everybody's sitting inside."
Biologist Rick Bartleson of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation said the brown gunk is a cyanobacteria algae, but a different variety than the toxic blue-green algae that clogged many waterways in Southwest Florida last year.
"There's a lot of sulfur in all marina algae, so you get the rotten egg smell," Bartleson said.
He said that it's likely building up now because the ecosystem is out of balance, thanks to last year's massive fish kills from red tide. After that event, he doesn't believe there are enough fish to eat the nutrients feeding the brown algae.
"This is sort of an aftermath of last year," he said.
But he's convinced that it isn't toxic to humans. He said that it should break down soon and go away.
"It'll float away, out into the Gulf," he said.
Bartleson said that while the algae isn't toxic to breathe, he recommends keeping dogs away from it, since they have been known to get sick from eating it.
