Posted on 01/14/2003 12:35:09 PM PST by cogitator
Ballast Water Violators Face Hefty Fines
WASHINGTON, DC, January 9, 2003 (ENS) - The U.S. Coast Guard has proposed imposing fines of up to $25,000 a day on vessels that fail to exchange their ballast water at sea before entering a U.S. port, or to submit reports documenting the exchange.
The agency has also proposed widening the application of reporting and recordkeeping requirements regarding ballast water, to apply to all vessels bound for ports or places within the United States, with minor exceptions.
CAPTION A ship discharges ballast water at sea, one of the best ways to prevent the spread of exotic marine species. (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Environmental Research Center)
The Coast Guard says the proposed actions would increase the agency's ability to protect against introductions of new aquatic invasive species via ballast water discharges, as required by the Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act of 1990 and the National Invasive Species Act of 1996.
Ships carry thousands of gallons of ballast water to help stabilize them during voyages. Ballast water exchange involves replacing coastal water with open ocean water during a voyage. This process reduces the density of coastal organisms in ballast tanks that may be able to invade a recipient port, replacing them with open ocean organisms with a lower probability of surviving in coastal waters.
Ballast water exchange is believed to be the best available management tool to reduce the risk of invasion by species carried in ballast water. Among the nonnative species that are believed to have invaded the U.S. by catching a ride in ballast water are the zebra mussel, rapa whelk and green crab, and researchers are concerned that disease carrying microbes may also be carried in ballast.
Under the new Coast Guard proposal, any person who violates U.S. regulations requiring ballast water exchange at sea could face fines as high as $25,000 for each violation, with each day of a continuing violation equaling a separate violation.
The penalty would apply to all vessels, U.S. and foreign, equipped with ballast tanks, that operate in the waters of the United States and are bound for ports or places in the United States.
Interesting. Terrorist potential?
I think the manatees are supposed to be in Florida.
You mean the new sub-species known as the Florida Manatee formerlly known as the West Indian Manatee?
They're not supposed to be in Florida full-time. Their historical migration patterns were permanently altered when they found the warm waters of hot-springs and power plants. Before then they would make their way back to the Carribean or South America for the warm water.
That is until they got lazy and were discovered by the greens who never met a critter they couldn't exploit.
Not to mention the fact that the speed zones have created a picket fence of slow moving boats that prevent them from moving out of the "protected zones."
I won't even bring up the destruction of seagrass and the attendant species take from their voracious appetites. Or their propagation of red tides.
Yep, they're a real asset. Yet another non-native species causing trouble while becoming a cause celeb by usful idiot environmentalist to take land for the state.
This isn't the best way of accomplishing the goal, but it is a good first step. Falsifying the documentation looks too easy.
You're getting that down pretty good there fella. ;-)
It's bad enough that these thugs use a non-native species at the expense of landowners for fun and profit. It's when you confront what it takes to fix the mess that gets you really pissed.
Cogitator, you just learned (again) why it's so perilous to make such statements in the presence of local knowledge, expert or otherwise.
Read the tag line. There is a better way.
Hey nunya, looks like I may be getting my first sale for my book as a college text (graduate level)! Been working on that one for a long time.
nunya, we hit a Manatee in the Anclotte River, but we killed the engine first. If there was ever a beast racing-towards-extinction, it's the Manatee!
I got porpoises in my backyard! It doesn't get much better.............FRegards
Yeah, that one.
They're not supposed to be in Florida full-time. Their historical migration patterns were permanently altered when they found the warm waters of hot-springs and power plants. Before then they would make their way back to the Carribean or South America for the warm water.
You mention the hot (warm) springs, like Crystal River, Suwannee and Homosassa Springs, Wakulla, etc. I remember (or at least I think I remember) that manatee bones at least a couple of thousand years old have been found in those springs, along with things like mammoth bones. Which would imply that even if the manatees are migrants, they've been there awhile. So it's hard for me to think of manatees the same way as zebra mussels or melaleuca trees.
No doubt that they have become dependent on power plants, though. Wasn't there an event a few years ago where one of the Broward power plants was turned off, and the state DOE got it turned back on because the manatees were going there expecting to find warm water?
That is until they got lazy and were discovered by the greens who never met a critter they couldn't exploit.
Not to mention the fact that the speed zones have created a picket fence of slow moving boats that prevent them from moving out of the "protected zones."
I won't even bring up the destruction of seagrass and the attendant species take from their voracious appetites. Or their propagation of red tides.
Please explain. I thought that they strictly ate floating vegetation. I hadn't heard about a red tide connection, either.
Yep, they're a real asset. Yet another non-native species causing trouble while becoming a cause celeb by usful idiot environmentalist to take land for the state.
Your points are interesting; I certainly never thought of the manatees as recent immigrants.
Nah!
The democRat infestation comes from flushing your head into the sea.
They got laws against that too.
"MYTH #9: Manatees are not a Florida indigenous species. They were imported into the state in the early part of the 20th century.
FACT: Fossil remains of manatee ancestors show they have inhabited Florida for about 45 million years. Modern manatees have been in Florida for over one million years (probably with intermittent absences during the Ice Ages); i.e., a lot longer than people have lived here. The present Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) is a subspecies endemic to Florida. Genetic studies to date indicate that it is not derived from the populations in Mexico or Central America, but more likely colonized Florida from the Greater Antilles thousands of years ago, after the last Ice Age. Further, there is no evidence that manatees are now entering Florida from Central America, the Caribbean, or anywhere else.The manatees in Florida today have every right to be considered Florida natives (10).
So, while there may be an argument about the protections currently afforded to Florida manatees, I don't think that it can be reasonably argued that they're a non-native species, unless you want to go a LONG way back in defining what's native!
While local knowledge is frequently accurate, at times it can also be contaminated with preconceptions and biased toward a particular vision of the way things ought to be, not necessarily the way they actually are. I'd still like to know if manatees really do overbrowse seagrass and how they are connected to red tide.
One uncertainty I have with what nunya_bidness said is what exactly is meant by seagrass. I tend to think of seagrass as either Thalassia testudinum (turtle grass), Halodule wrightii (shoal grass), or Syringodium filoforme (the aptly named manatee grass). My understanding of these seagrasses was that they had to be in brackish to nearly seawater-salinity environments. And I thought that manatees actually preferred freshwater aquatic plants if they could get them.
But... reading the report I provided indicates that they do forage seagrass. Page 17 of the report says that manatees can knock down plant biomass (seagrasses) quite a bit into the winter months, but that the plant biomass recovers without indication of foraging effects during the spring and summer when the manatees disperse. So, based on that one reference, it doesn't appear that manatees do appreciable long-term damage to seagrass beds, but I'm definitely open to new information on that topic.
The report below gets into what manatees eat in a great level of detail. I remember back in the 60's it was hoped that manatees would be able to do something about the water hyacinths (which I'm pretty sure are an invasive species) that were choking the South Florida waterways. While they definitely consume water hyacinth, I don't remember that they were effective in clearing it out.
Manatee Habitat and Human-related Threats to Seagrass in Florida: A Review
I don't know, but would suspect the latter is related to nutrients released in by excretion.
WRT overbrowsing, that is an inherently subjective conclusion. If you are a seagrass, browsing may be good or bad. If you are a seagrass-dependent species, that would follow. If you are a species competing with seagrass or adverse to seagrass habitat...
What do you want to see achieved?
It's a competitive and dynamic system with its own ebbs and flows of adaptave mechanics. Given the history of human impact, "Natural" doesn't exist and perhaps never did, because it is itself a subjective impression. Government is incapable of managing the resource among all this wailing and breastbeating when there are so many people behind the curtain with deep pockets and ulterior motives.
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