What Our Investigation Has Uncovered

Hello, my name is Jim Abernethy,

Because we have never met, let me state that I am a marine-life expert that has appeared in films for National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and Netflix. I am an award-winning photographer, author, cinematographer and conservationist.

I've spent the better part of the last two weeks with a small team, investigating all aspects of the red tide. I have stumbled upon a huge, overlooked constant nutrient feeding and polluting of Lake Okeechobee that can be stopped very easily and immediately! I am hoping that your station will air my findings so we can start to stop the feeding of the red tide and hopefully slow down the death of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish!

The Red Tide, in my opinion, is very much like a small campfire, under normal conditions, it would not affect much...but we are dumping millions of gallons of gasoline onto this small fire and burning Florida and all its wildlife to the ground! We must stop the fuel that is feeding this fire, and I have just discovered a huge source of the fuel that we can stop immediately, in fact stopping it will actually save Florida from wasting more money and adding more nutrients that are killing more animals, making people sick and killing coastal communities and jobs.

Our own Florida government through the FWC (Fish and Wildlife Conservation) is spraying poison in all our lakes, rivers, canals and even lake Okeechobee in an effort to kill an invasive aquatic plant called hydrilla. Hundreds of permitted contractors are all over the state, still spraying poison into our aquifers,(90% of Floridians water source) Monday thru Friday, 40 hours a week for the last 40 years. The active ingredient is Glyphosate! Yes, the same active ingredient that recently the Company Monsanto lost a court case and paid nearly 300 million to settle it because it causes cancer.

From the FWC website, 714,000 gallons of glyphosate and other
herbicides were sprayed in just 2015 alone.

Here is a professor Professor James Douglas's perspective on how this is affecting our red tide. "There are two main ways that I think excessive spraying of herbicides could contribute to our toxic algae blooms: One is the simple fact that when plants die and decompose, that releases nutrients and nutrients fuel the growth of the algae. The other way that herbicides may contribute to these algae blooms is that the herbicide itself, the chemical when it breaks down, it breaks down into forms of phosphates that are actually a nutrient that fuels the growth of algae."

In addition to that, if this hydrilla plant, as well as the others that are being killed, were alive, they would be removing nutrients every single day!

Here is another scientist that speaks about this issue as well. Dr. Geoffrey Norris states: "Glyphosate is of particular concern since it has been used heavily in the agriculture areas around Lake Okeechobee and upstream in the Kissimmee River watershed for at least 25 years. Glyphosate provides a source of phosphorous for blue-green algae and recent research shows that it enhances the growth of blue-green bacteria and actually become tolerant and absorb glyphosate directly." He further states: "Because blue-green algae can make their own supply of nitrogen, they only need other important elements to survive, and one of those is phosphorus.

Thank you, for signing and sharing our petition!