Dead fish line Charlotte County beaches: is red tide to blame?

A sight no one wants to see: dead fish have begun to accumulate along the coast in Charlotte County, could it be red tide?

WINK News anchor Liz Biro went to the Lemon Bay area on Manasota Key is find out whether all the dead fish are being caused by the slow-creeping red tide.

It looks like red tide, it smells like red tide, and one scientist we spoke with said that the low to moderate levels of red tide to the north are likely creeping south into our area in Southwest Florida.

Laurie Winter sent WINK a video that showed dead fish not forming a wrack line, but a wrack pile on the beach at Stump Pass.

“One of my favorite spots: Stump Pass Beach. People are asking if the water’s good… I mean what do you think,” she said in the video.

What looks like light glistening off the water around Lemon Bay off Manasota Key is actually dead fish.

“I mean miles 1000s and 1000s of dead fish in the water as you head south in Lemon Bay,” Winter explained. “After I took a couple videos, I just sat on the gulf side and I just cried.”

Over Winter’s head, a wake of vultures circled.

Boating around, you’ll see specks of dead fish but it’s hard to tell how significant the problem is until you stumble across something like in Winter’s video, a graveyard of dead fish.

And it’s not just smaller fish, Ryan O’Day found a goliath grouper off the coast of Boca Grande Sunday evening.

“Just see its belly out of the water the size of a basketball, it’s shocking,” said O’Day.

O’Day took us out around Boca Grande to show the extent of it.

“We saw mackerel out there; there’s snook floating out there. Everything, snappers, puffer fish,” he explained. “These red tides aren’t discriminate killers, if it swims it dies.”

Mike Parsons is a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, and he is the expert on red tide in southwest Florida. It’s starting as it usually does, up by Tampa and Sarasota then making its way down to us.

“This is typically when we see red tide. It’s actually unusual when we do not see red tide this time of year,” Parsons explained. “We’ll just kind of keep an eye on it, do we expect it to follow its normal year, where it might be bad, but end by January or February? Or will this one persist for yet unknown reasons.”

O’Day and Winter know an extended red tide is more than dead fish.

“It’s almost November. This area thrives off tourism, and there’s nowhere to go,” Winter said.

“And so you have the impact on people, you have the impact on economy and the impact on ecosystem, which is huge,” said O’Day.

If you have health issues, Parsons recommends avoiding the area. If you have asthma or COPD or another respiratory issue, that could be a big issue.

If there are a lot of dead fish on the beach, be careful. Sharp spines and fins could puncture your foot and create bacterial infection concerns.