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when he hooks a fish on tv, wiggins famously hollers, \u201cthere he is!\u201d he calls prize catches \u201cmogans,\u201d mixing the southern nickname \u201cbiggans\u201d and the northern vernacular, \u201cmonsters.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
over the decades, the mogans became harder to find. as wiggins hauled fish out of the indian river lagoon, he observed the coastal ecosystem changing. first came the vanishing critters. as a kid, wiggins recalled, he encountered millions of fragile starfish dotting parris island channels. \u201ci haven\u2019t seen one in 30 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
the same holds true for seagrass, shellfish, horseshoe crabs, sea trout and mullet. wading near the south banyan isles and pineda, scraggly seagrass scratched his little-boy legs like prairie grass, and fanned out just as far. brevard county was known as the sea trout capital of the world<\/a>, wiggins said. \u201cyou could go out off of any given dock, any bank, throw out a shrimp on a popping cork and catch a trout anywhere in brevard county.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n when the seagrasses first disappeared, it was a little easier to fish\u2014the trout were stark in the waters. today, it\u2019s tough to find them at all, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n in the past, hundreds of mullet would leap out of the water in a five-minute span. the splashes are now silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n nearly a half a century after he bought that tiny outboard, and more than two decades after he became a tv fishing star, wiggins is moving into his third act. rather than extracting marine life from his childhood waters, he is putting it back. he and fellow citizens along the indian river coast are planting millions of hard clams, part of burgeoning initiatives across florida to reintroduce historic shellfish to clean up waterways and restore life up the food chain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n oysters and hard clams, cradled in their self-built shells, clean water as they develop. clams gobble algae through a siphon and expel feces, a fertilizer for seagrass and food for shrimp. once they\u2019re settled on the bottom, they clasp sea grass, rooting it into the soil. each clam filters 20 gallons of water a day. reintroducing shellfish to waterways is a natural solution, a return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n quahog clams once thrived throughout florida\u2019s coastlines. native american mounds along the spruce creek<\/a> reveal an abundance of oysters and clams, along with saltwater fish. but by the 21st century, the populations were devastated. todd osborne, a researcher at the university of florida\u2019s whitney laboratory for marine bioscience, calls it death by 1,000 cuts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n as the four-mile pineda causeway was built in 1973, carving into the indian river and banana river lagoons, blair wiggins and his father chugged along south across from patrick air force base. the pair glared at the hulk of concrete. \u201ctake a good look around son,\u201d his father said. \u201cbecause there\u2019s the beginning of the end.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201che was right,\u201d said cari wiggins, blair\u2019s wife and the director of \u201cblair wiggins outdoors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n the pineda causeway was one of 13 causeways<\/a> constructed across the indian river lagoon. around the state, the raised roads choke water flow by creating a narrow opening. the bottleneck impedes water exchange and marine life migration. pockets of decaying matter gather in its corners, fueling algal blooms. blair calls them: \u201cdams with roads on top.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cthey funneled into a small opening and everything quit moving,\u201d cari wiggins said. \u201cwater is not going to want to flow sideways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n the collapse of clams can also be traced to the commercial shellfish industry. at its peak in the 1980s and \u201890s, semi-trucks idled at boat ramps to pick up croker bags of native clams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n the intense harvesting was the \u201cnail in the coffin\u201d for wild clam populations, osborne said. he estimates harvesting data only cover a third of actual numbers because cash was involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n osborne said at the peak, the wild clam harvest was like the wild west; clammers collected the shelled critters in the thousands. unload. get paid. do it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cthe clam boats that you saw, you could have lined them up side by side and walked to merritt island,\u201d cari wiggins said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n hard clams burrow in seagrass. as the clammers dragged spiked clam rakes along the bottom, they inadvertently dredged up seagrass and crushed the smallest clams and horseshoe crabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cevery morning i would get up and go to the boat ramp, literally it was a sea of grass floating on top of the water from where they had been digging with their rakes,\u201d blair said.<\/p>\n\n\n\ndeath by 1,000 cuts<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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