You can learn a lot of things while skimming across the Everglades in an airboat with TV host Jeff Corwin. One of those things is that a dragonfly to the face at 25 mph will wake you up faster than a cup of coffee.
Another nugget of knowledge from the Corwin experience is that half the freshwater fish species in the Everglades are nonnative invaders.
Corwin, a Massachusetts native and host of myriad wildlife and conservation shows over the past 30 or so years, was here in South Florida to host the Miccosukee Tribe’s 5th annual Removal of the Swamp Invaders Fishing Tournament.
The tournament’s goal is to bring attention to the fact that the ecosystem the Miccosukee have inhabited for centuries, and which has been brutalized time and again by Florida’s development, is plagued with yet another challenge — invasive fish that outcompete, displace and eat native species.
“The native species here aren’t able to thrive because these nonnative fish take over,” says Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee grandmother and environmental leader who was born and raised in the Everglades. “So the tournament is about education. It’s about helping the native fish that we have.”
Corwin, who’s also partnering with the tribe on a television series, “Wildlife Nation with Jeff Corwin: Expedition Florida” on ABC, hoped to help out by catching a few of the invasives himself.
The fish camp
After speeding through 16 miles of swarming dragonflies, we reached an area where the sawgrass gave way to bigger tree islands.
We throttled down and pulled into a middle-of-nowhere fish camp. The dark waters around it were full of fish. Invasive catfish jumped, a native gar and bowfin cruised by. Invasive oscars loitered near the dock.
Corwin took a cast and immediately hooked up. The fish shook free but he hooked up again and again on consecutive casts, hauling in dozens of fat oscars fish, which hail from the Amazon River basin and are dark brown with lovely orange flecks across their flanks.
Corwin fished for the next hour or so while shooting the breeze with the fish camp owners and landing fish after fish after fish, tossing them into a cooler. All but one, a small warmouth bass, which he released, was invasive.
“Every cast, we’ve got a fish, or at least a hit. And every fish we’ve got is from somewhere else. That tells you something right there,” he said.
The exotics and invasives have been a problem for many decades, says Marcel Bozas, acting director of the Miccosukee Tribe Fish and Wildlife Department.
“Up until about four years ago, you could just go out here and catch bass. That’s tough now. You can certainly catch a lot of fish, it’s just invasives. … They come from people having them in their aquariums. They release them because they’re a pain to have. They’re very aggressive, so people get rid of them.”
The Everglades has suffered waves of different invaders. Mayan cichlids were dominant for a long time, says Bozas, and they were competing for food with native species like sunfish and bluegill, but also preying on the young of anything they could catch, including bass.
Lately things have changed for the worse, he says. “Oscars came in a little later, but now they’ve really capitalized and become the new dominant predator in our waterways. They’re not a big fish, but they’re super-aggressive. They’ll be hammering the juveniles of fish like bass, and pushing out some of the native species from bedding (nesting) areas.”
Corwin’s haul was mostly oscars, even way out here, 16 miles from the nearest road. They’re outright heedless, which makes them easy to catch, but also voracious competitors.
“Native animals here are not evolved to compete with species from Asia, South America,” said Corwin. Not all the nonnative fish are considered invasive. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, invasive species “negatively impact native fish and wildlife, cause damage that is costly to repair, or pose a threat to human health and safety.”
“The reality is you’re never going to get rid of the invasives,” said Corwin as he sets the hook on another fish. “The genie is out of the bottle. But the tournament is a great way to bring attention to the issue.”
Corwin, who’d been out until 1 a.m. hunting pythons (he snagged an 8-footer!), has a seemingly bottomless well of enthusiasm for anything wild. He smiles as a swallow-tailed kite arcs overhead.
“When my family lived in a triple-decker in Quincy, Massachusetts, my dad was working in a donut shop, working in a printing shop at night and was trying to become a Boston cop, there was no nature. … I dreamed of Florida — the gopher tortoise and the indigo snake, that was my dream, to experience that.”
He thinks the Florida of today is on an environmental precipice.
“Florida is more than just an amusement park, or a convention center, or a beautiful beach. Florida is the most ecologically important place in America — our only coral reefs, our only true mangrove forests. … Then you have the juxtaposition of Florida as the poster child for what’s going wrong in the world with nature — climate change, sea-level rise, development, pollution, invasive species — all of that have come together in this perfect storm.”
The invasives the tournament is targeting in the Everglades are yet another burden to the whole web, he said. The theme for the current Florida-focused season of Corwin’s “Wildlife Nation” is that everything in Florida is interconnected.
“What happens here is connected to here, and what you do in this lake affects this coral reef, how you manage this estuary will affect this seagrass bed, this agricultural project will impact this riparian system. So the idea is to look at Florida holistically. … It begins and ends in the Everglades and the story of a people (the Miccosukee) whose whole cultural survival is connected to this environment.”
As we leave the fish camp and head out to the tournament weigh-in, we pass through an eddy of wind scented with jasmine, then spot one school of small bass — the only ones we’ll see the entire day.
The weigh-ins
Back at the Miccosukee Indian Village on Tamiami Trail, the smell of fish slime, some fresh, some not so fresh, pervaded the weigh-in area. Anglers showed up with coolers full of fish — colorful, camouflaged, long, short, stout, skinny — and spilled them out across a big blue tarp, where wildlife officials counted and weighed them.
The nonnative species list for the Everglades reads like a geography quiz amid a circus act: There’s the clown knife fish, which looks like a big swimming machete; the polka-dotted jaguar guapote; the Orinoco sailfin catfish, which resembles an armored tanks with fins; long and aggressive snakeheads from Asia; Mayan cichlids; big Nile and blue tilapia, and many others.
One contestant brought in 98 pounds of fish, including a 3-foot goldline snakehead.
Another cooler contained a huge Nile tilapia. “That’s the biggest tilapia I’ve ever seen in my life!” said one of the wildlife officials.
Gabriel Peter Jimenez, of Miami, rolled in with a particularly broad array of species, including a hefty Nile tilapia, so big it was a possible prize winner.
“He was on a bed 10-feet down,” said Jimenez, explaining that the fish had cleared a gravel nest in anticipation of a female showing up. Jimenez said he cast a jig onto the nest, and when the tilapia sucked it in to remove it, he hooked him.
“I scouted him for a couple months,” said Jimenez, who works in aquaculture and takes his invasives seriously. “I love the environment of the tournament,” he said. “I love the people. I love talking to the rangers. I love talking to people of similar mindsets. It’s about just getting out here and enjoying the Everglades and seeing what other people catch.
“I catch a lot of fish, but there’s always someone who’s going to catch more or different fish than me, and I like to talk to those guys.”
A mercury conundrum
Marcel Bozas helps run the tournament. He said anglers can take home whatever fish of their own they want, but the rest will be donated to the Everglades Alligator Farm for gator food.
Though the piles of exotic fish seem fit for human feasting, there is a concern of mercury contamination, said Bozas.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, exposure to methylmercury through eating fish can impair peripheral vision, coordination and speech in adults.
Methylmercury exposure in the womb can later lead to children experiencing impacts to their cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, fine motor skills, and visual spatial skills.
The Florida Department of Health suggests that children and women of childbearing age eat no more than one meal per month of most of these species if they come from Everglades waters. For anyone else it’s one meal per week.
“It gets worse as you go up the food chain,” Bozas said. “The more predatory the fish, the more mercury bio-accumulates in them. So species like tilapia that are mostly eating plants are going to have a lot lower mercury concentrations, so people don’t need to be as concerned with it. But you still want to be conscientious about it.”
Betty Osceola was working the event and taking care of her granddaughter during the weigh-ins. “You don’t see as much of the largemouth bass in the canals,” she said, and bluegills, once omnipresent, are now hard to find. “Growing up we used to always fish for bluegills,” she said. Her granddaughter, who loves to fish, interrupted to ask what a bluegill is. “See, even she hasn’t seen them.”
Osceola said that native bowfin and gars are particularly important to the Miccosukee. “There are certain times of year that we have our cultural ceremonies that the men ahead of time will go fishing to provide fish to families for the (ceremonial) meal. In order to do that we have to have healthy fish. It’s a big part of our ceremonies.”
The competing invasives are a concern, but so is the mercury.
As a countermeasure, the tribe has created aquaculture facilities for both species to boost their availability, and keep them clear of chemicals in the food chain. And when a big event is coming up, tribe members will catch wild gar and keep them in the facility for a spell, which lowers their mercury content.
The tournament results
Bozas and the other wildlife officials have finished tallying the invasives. The biggest fish was the goldline snakehead at 8 pounds, 1 ounce, caught by Steven Hodgdon. Gabriel Jimenez’s rotund Nile tilapia was just an ounce short, at 8 pounds, but Jimenez won the Exotic Slam category of catching the most species, with 15.
Both men took home cash prizes. All told, the tournament removed 1,205 pounds of exotic invasive fish from the Everglades.
During the tournament presentation, Osceola, who also runs airboat ecotours, addressed the crowd.
She said the toughest question she’s ever been asked while on a tour was from a child: “‘Why don’t they want to save the Everglades?’” the kid asked.
“What do you tell them? Maybe that’s a question we all need to think about,” she said.
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.
