As hurricane Michael churned through the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall near Florida’s Apalachicola River in 2018, it left a sea of destruction in its wake.
As hurricane Michael churned through the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall near Florida’s Apalachicola River in 2018, it left a sea of destruction in its wake.
The path was easy to follow on land, but debris and infrastructure failures also diminished the river’s water quality and led to the death of roughly half the gulf sturgeon population there. A study by researchers at the University of Georgia with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reveals new details in how a decrease in oxygen levels affected the river’s ability to sustain life in the days following the historic Category 5 storm.
The results were published in the December issue of Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.
Data supporting the findings was possible due to an ongoing long-term project in the Apalachicola River monitoring gulf sturgeon. Fish that had been fitted with special tags continued to be tracked by equipment that survived the storm, while weather stations and tide gauges reported statistics such as temperature, water flows and oxygen levels.
Read more at University of Georgia
Image: A sub-adult gulf sturgeon (Credit: University of Georgia)
