Susan Cocking's Outdoors

More hurricane-related fallout

In addition to marching lobsters and schooling muttons, the close passage of a tropical system over South Florida has other interesting side-effects.

One week ago, scientists from Mote Marine's Tropical Research Lab on Summerland Key made a late-night trip out to Looe Key to document the annual coral spawn.  The scientists had timed their outing based on the full moon the week before, which coincided with the onset of Tropical Storm Fay.  The researchers were expecting that the mountainous star corals (and perhaps even the threatened branching corals  -- the staghorn and elkhorn) would start spewing tiny pink bundles that look like BBs containing eggs and sperm.  They planned to collect some of the spawn to grow out in the laboratory.

But nothing happened.  Well, almost nothing.  Even though the corals failed to do the wild thing that night, numerous  fluorescent palolo worms could be observed getting busy on the calm surface.  Lit a bright chartreuse by bioluminescence, the worms popped to the surface in Spaghetti-O formation, then dispersed into a murky cloud and disappeared.

Why is this important, you ask?  Palolo worms are a favorite food of tarpon.  The silver kings are so fond of the worms that they behave as if on an LSD trip -- flopping around acting like they took an hallucinogen and refusing all other offerings of food in the vicinity.  Fly fishermen who have observed tarpon in a palolo worm hatch say they behave as stupidly as deer in the rut, ignoring fishermen and boats and eagerly inhaling flies that look like their drug of choice.

I did not observe any tarpon on my dive that night.  But I had this pleasant thought:  maybe the resilience and plenitude of palolo worms is but one factor in the wonderful spring-summer tarpon season we have enjoyed this year.  The passage of a not-really-strong tropical storm managed to block the corals' natural urges, but not those of the worms.

In the interests of tarpon everywhere (and the anglers who love to pursue them), I would strongly encourage the palolo worms to continue getting fruitful and multiplying.

A strange bonefishery

On the final day of my vacation in Bonaire (one of the ABC islands of the Netherlands Antilles; the others are Aruba and Curacao), I got a chance to do some bonefishing.  This is an unusual fishery compared to what we are familiar with in South Florida and the Bahamas.  The only really good place to bonefish in Bonaire is on the Cargill salt flats.  Unfortunately, this is private property, and anglers can only enter with a permit from the company, or with a permitted guide such as Chris Morkos.  The salt flats are a vast, landlocked estuary where ocean water enters through a couple of sluice gates and is channelled into containment ponds to evaporate and be collected to make the salt you put in your margaritas.  It is impossible to fish from a boat; you park your vehicle and wade on the flats.  In a morning of fishing, I didn't see any bones at all.  But in the afternoon, I followed a channel from one of the sluice gates until it drained into a shallow flat.  Within the first five minutes of walking in the knee-deep water, I saw a tailer and got so nervous that I hit the fish with the fly.  For the next hour, I probably saw a dozen more tailers, but couldn't manage to plant my fly where they would readily eat it.  (Sometimes, when you hit a fish with a cast, you become gun-shy and then don't cast close enough!)  Whether I was using the right flies or not (tiny, dark salmon-like patterns), I wouldn't know because I never got anything even close to a take.  I remembered from a trip there about a decade ago that the bonefish like to eat small, black crabs.  And captain Jan Maizler of Bay Harbor, who goes there often, advises not to use anything with lead eyes.  Anyway, it was an interesting project and one I would like to try again.