What's the Problem?

Natural and man-made organic sediment upset the balance here. The result: the natural eelgrasses died off and Lyngbya took over.

Beginning in the 1960s, the building of waterfront homes and businesses changed much of Kings Bay and parts of the Crystal River shorelines. These activities changed water circulation, reduced the amount of natural wetlands, and created conditions that allowed parts of Crystal River and Kings Bay to be dominated by invasive, unhealthy algae called Lyngbya. Large amounts of algae growth can cause reduced water clarity and extreme changes in oxygen levels, which are stressful to animal and plant life. In this video you will learn more about Lyngbya and Save Crystal River, a community project to help restore Crystal River and Kings Bay.

Learn More About Lyngbya

Lyngbya is a large-celled, filamentous, mat-forming cyanobacterium (blue-green alga). It occurs in fresh water and especially flourishes in Florida’s spring-fed waters. An individual Lyngbya filament is usually unbranched. It is composed of large, discoid cells that are stacked within a firm, polysaccharide sheath; much as pennies are stacked within a roll of coins. Lyngbya mats may be several inches thick and can cover large areas of the water surface or benthic (bottom) sediments.

Watch the Video

As you watch, listen for information about:

How the area has changed over the past 60 years
The goals of the Save Crystal River project
The problems being caused by Lyngbya

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Video Transcript

Crystal River, Florida, is home to an aquatic paradise. It's an ecosystem which includes an estuary, river, and spring system that all starts at Kings Bay. Kings Bay proper is about 600 acres. It's a fairly good size bay, but then you've got all these canals that go back up into where the residences are and go back up into Three Sisters Springs.

Lisa Moore is president of Save Crystal River, a coalition and partnership made up of friends, neighbors, and community leaders. What we want to see is that it's brought back to its pristine condition, like it was in the '60s, where the water was so clear that you could look off anybody's dock and you'd see fish and crabs and grasses, and it would be just absolutely beautiful.

Over the past 60 years, the river and bay have changed dramatically. Environmental scientist Dr. Chris Anastasiou attributes the main culprit to be Lyngbya, an algae-like material.

Lyngbya is a very strange organism. It's a cyanobacteria. It is blue - green algae. So it kind of behaves like a plant, and sometimes it kind of behaves a little bit more like an animal in the sense that it can live in almost no light, and it can almost feed on itself.

Natural and man-made organic sediment upset the balance here. The result, the natural eelgrasses died off and Lyngbya took over. And that's been the case here in Kings Bay.

The old saying, "nature abhors a vacuum." if there is an area that is disturbed, in other words, you lose a lot of the native grasses that were there, Lyngbya comes in and basically takes over and that’s been the case here in King's Bay.

In October of 2015, restoration began. Legislators, local politicians, and interested residents came together to kick off the efforts. The plan is twofold --vacuum up the Lyngbya and organic material and plant native Florida eelgrasses.

Take Notes

Using information from the text and video, write two to three sentences describing the environmental problems facing the Crystal River and Kings Bay habitats.

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