The Red Tide

At St. Petersburg, the tarpon boats lay idle at their piers. Down the coast at Sarasota, merchants glumly watched the summer vacationists pack their bags and leave. The beach hot-dog stands were deserted at Indian Rocks and Pass-a-Grille; many beach cottages were empty. Under the hot summer sun, the stench of rotting fish seeped into houses, clung to clothes. The strange phenomenon which Floridians called the "Red Tide" had come back to the Gulf Coast.

The Red Tide had appeared off the west coast of Florida last January (TIME, Feb. 10). Fishermen first noticed long, wavering streaks of reddish-amber smudging the blue Gulf waters. Floating in the streaks, bellies up, were thousands of dead fish.

By the thousands, the carcasses had washed ashore on the beaches between Boca Grande and Naples.

Mottled Death. The amber streaks disappeared. Then, in the middle of July, the Red Tide reappeared off Gasparilla Island. Slowly, it worked northward, dissipating mysteriously, as mysteriously reforming. Last week off St. Petersburg, the Red Tide stretched in mottled patches over an area 60 miles long and 25 miles wide. As it spread, fish flopped crazily on the edges and died. Flies buzzed over their rotting carcasses on the beaches. Shore residents suffered headaches, burning throats and coughs.

Those who tried swimming in the infected water complained of breaking out in a rash. Strangely, no sea birds wheeled and screamed over the decaying mass. They had disappeared.

60 Million to a Quart. At first, fishermen made big hauls of redfish, mullet, and grouper, which fled into the shallow bays and inlets to escape the plague. But their catches stayed in the fish houses. People did not feel like eating fish.

No one knew for certain what had caused the phenomenon. Dr. F. G. Walton Smith, director of the University of Miami's Marine Laboratory, was sure it was a sudden multiplication of a new species of tiny, one-celled organisms called gymnodinium. He had found as many as 60 million of them in a quart of "red" water. The fish were killed either by a poison secreted by these organisms or as a result of their death and decay, he thought. Their sudden appearance might be explained by an increase in the phosphate content of Gulf water from phosphate plants near Tampa.

Property-owners manned shovels and wheelbarrows, held their noses and tried to bury the fish. Beaches were drenched with DDT. At week's end, the Red Tide still mottled the Gulf. The only hope for suffering Floridians was that a storm would break up the amber plague or carry it somewhere else.

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