Jeff Corwin and Miccosukee team up to combat invasive fish

You can learn a lot of things while skimming across the Everglades in an airboat with TV host Jeff Corwin. One of those things is that a dragonfly to the face at 25 mph will wake you up faster than a cup of coffee.

Another nugget of knowledge from the Corwin experience is that half the freshwater fish species in the Everglades are nonnative invaders.

Corwin, a Massachusetts native and host of myriad wildlife and conservation shows over the past 30 or so years, was here in South Florida to host the Miccosukee Tribe’s 5th annual Removal of the Swamp Invaders Fishing Tournament.

The tournament’s goal is to bring attention to the fact that the ecosystem the Miccosukee have inhabited for centuries, and which has been brutalized time and again by Florida’s development, is plagued with yet another challenge — invasive fish that outcompete, displace and eat native species.

“The native species here aren’t able to thrive because these nonnative fish take over,” says Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee grandmother and environmental leader who was born and raised in the Everglades. “So the tournament is about education. It’s about helping the native fish that we have.”

Corwin, who’s also partnering with the tribe on a television series, “Wildlife Nation with Jeff Corwin: Expedition Florida” on ABC, hoped to help out by catching a few of the invasives himself.

The fish camp

After speeding through 16 miles of swarming dragonflies, we reached an area where the sawgrass gave way to bigger tree islands.

We throttled down and pulled into a middle-of-nowhere fish camp. The dark waters around it were full of fish. Invasive catfish jumped, a native gar and bowfin cruised by. Invasive oscars loitered near the dock.

Corwin took a cast and immediately hooked up. The fish shook free but he hooked up again and again on consecutive casts, hauling in dozens of fat oscars fish, which hail from the Amazon River basin and are dark brown with lovely orange flecks across their flanks.

Corwin fished for the next hour or so while shooting the breeze with the fish camp owners and landing fish after fish after fish, tossing them into a cooler. All but one, a small warmouth bass, which he released, was invasive.

“Every cast, we’ve got a fish, or at least a hit. And every fish we’ve got is from somewhere else. That tells you something right there,” he said.

The exotics and invasives have been a problem for many decades, says Marcel Bozas, acting director of the Miccosukee Tribe Fish and Wildlife Department.

“Up until about four years ago, you could just go out here and catch bass. That’s tough now. You can certainly catch a lot of fish, it’s just invasives. … They come from people having them in their aquariums. They release them because they’re a pain to have. They’re very aggressive, so people get rid of them.”

The Everglades has suffered waves of different invaders. Mayan cichlids were dominant for a long time, says Bozas, and they were competing for food with native species like sunfish and bluegill, but also preying on the young of anything they could catch, including bass.

Lately things have changed for the worse, he says. “Oscars came in a little later, but now they’ve really capitalized and become the new dominant predator in our waterways. They’re not a big fish, but they’re super-aggressive. They’ll be hammering the juveniles of fish like bass, and pushing out some of the native species from bedding (nesting) areas.”

Corwin’s haul was mostly oscars, even way out here, 16 miles from the nearest road. They’re outright heedless, which makes them easy to catch, but also voracious competitors.

“Native animals here are not evolved to compete with species from Asia, South America,” said Corwin. Not all the nonnative fish are considered invasive. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, invasive species “negatively impact native fish and wildlife, cause damage that is costly to repair, or pose a threat to human health and safety.”

“The reality is you’re never going to get rid of the invasives,” said Corwin as he sets the hook on another fish. “The genie is out of the bottle. But the tournament is a great way to bring attention to the issue.”

Corwin, who’d been out until 1 a.m. hunting pythons (he snagged an 8-footer!), has a seemingly bottomless well of enthusiasm for anything wild. He smiles as a swallow-tailed kite arcs overhead.

“When my family lived in a triple-decker in Quincy, Massachusetts, my dad was working in a donut shop, working in a printing shop at night and was trying to become a Boston cop, there was no nature. … I dreamed of Florida — the gopher tortoise and the indigo snake, that was my dream, to experience that.”

He thinks the Florida of today on an environmental precipice.

“Florida is more than just an amusement park, or a convention center, or a beautiful beach. Florida is the most ecologically important place in America — our only coral reefs, our only true mangrove forests. … Then you have the juxtaposition of Florida as the poster child for what’s going wrong in the world with nature — climate change, sea-level rise, development, pollution, invasive species — all of that have come together in this perfect storm.”

The invasives the tournament is targeting in the Everglades are yet another burden to the whole web, he said. The theme for the current Florida-focused season of Corwin’s “Wildlife Nation” is that everything in Florida is interconnected.

“What happens here is connected to here, and what you do in this lake affects this coral reef, how you manage this estuary will affect this seagrass bed, this agricultural project will impact this riparian system. So the idea is to look at Florida holistically. … It begins and ends in the Everglades and the story of a people (the Miccosukee) whose whole cultural survival is connected to this environment.”