Our Nest on Wheels: Florida

Everglades, Part 1: Flamingo and Shark Valley

Everglades National Park is an amazing place. I'm glad we went there this February.

Also, I don't think we'll ever go back.

Besides its manifold attractions (which I will eventually get to), the Everglades is known for heat, humidity, and bugs. Lots of bugs. Mosquitoes especially. And they don't come out just at dawn and dusk; they rule the place all day long. The Visitor Center has a handy chart to help you understand the current mosquito level, as if you didn't know already. We were at the "Unpleasant" level. I can't imagine what "Hysterical" would be like.

Add to that combination a broken air conditioner (and the fact that the Flamingo campground is 44 miles from the nearest small town and who knows how far from the nearest RV repair person), and you don't necessarily get happy campers.

But enough of our first-world problems.

Everglades National Park has three main areas: Anhinga, near the entrance to the park; Flamingo, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula; and Shark Valley, accessible via a different entrance to the north of the main east entrance.

There are campgrounds at Long Pine Key and Flamingo, but you can't reserve a site at Long Pine key (and it doesn't have electricity). We'd heard (and have found to be true) that reservations are important in Florida in the winter, so we stayed at Flamingo.

It's hotter at Flamingo than elsewhere in the park. And there are more mosquitoes. Just saying.

Let's start with the stuff that everyone goes to the Everglades to see: alligators and birds. The place to see these is Shark Valley. This day-use area is located on the north side of the park off a road appropriately called "Alligator Alley." Shark Valley has a 15-mile bike path that takes you about 7.5 miles into the Everglades, along a canal that is very attractive to alligators because it has water all year round. We started counting alligators, then gave up. It's amazing how quickly you can become blase about seeing these large reptiles.

Here's Jane carefully avoiding one. I note that she is being careless by riding on the wrong side of the road...

At the end of the bike path is an observation tower that gives you a good view of the surrounding area and the large pond at its base. We got to see this fellow attack and eat something, probably a fish. It was hard to tell, as alligators tend to make a lot of splashing in the water when they catch something.

Flamingo is a different environment. Flamingo sits at the southern land tip of the Everglades park (the park extends far out into the gulf of Mexico, and the water is only a couple of feet deep for much of it), and it also happens to be at the northernmost range of the crocodile. At Flamingo, the fresh water from the Everglades flows into the salt water of the gulf. Since alligators live in fresh water, and crocodiles live in salt/brackish water, Flamingo is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles live together. Manatees also tend to congregate in the marina at Flamingo. Seems that they know that there is fresh water dripping out of the outboard motors when they get flushed (to remove the salt water), and the manatees come up to the motors and drink the dripping water. Odd, but cute in a way.

Here's a large (12 feet long) crocodile that hangs out in the marina area.

You'll notice the differences from the alligator - the crocodile has a pointy snout and is grey in color.

The Flamingo area used to have a lot more activity than it has now. There was a lodge, a restaurant, and rental cabins. But all were severely damaged by a hurricane in 2005 and had to be closed. Read more about it here. By 2008, they had determined that the lodge was damaged beyond repair and would need to be torn down when the funds were available. It's 2017, and the lodge is still waiting to be demolished. The restaurant is sort of semi-functional. There's a seating area that's usable, but the kitchen is not. So there's a food truck parked next to the building where they do the cooking for a limited menu.

The Everglades is a World Heritage site. People come from all over the world to see it, and we did encounter people from many different places. But what they find is one of the great US treasures left to decay, without even sufficient funding to demolish the damaged buildings, let alone replace them. They can't understand how the US can let this happen, and neither can I.

by Steve

Next: Everglades, Part 2: Anhinga and Nike missiles.

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

aquaculture

Clams and Oysters

I (Steve) had never really given clams and oysters too much thought. Clams came in chowder, and oysters on a shell, perhaps. Or I thought maybe clams were freshwater and oysters were saltwater. Well, here we are in Cedar Key, Florida, and it turns out to be a really good place to learn about them. We toured the Southern Cross Sea Farms, one of many aquaculture farms here in Cedar Key to learn more.

But first, some history. Cedar Key's story is one of boom and bust over the years. It was a busy rail depot/seaport for cargo to New Orleans and passengers to Key West or Havana, until Tampa came online and took over. At one time there were two pencil factories in town, until the red cedar ran out. The fiber factory supplied the brush industry all over the world from 1910 until 1952, when synthetic fibers took over. And the fishing industry carried the town until net fishing was banned in 1995. Then the State of Florida and the University of Florida introduced aquaculture to the area.

Back to clams and oysters. You can read all about the differences here. But here's the simple version: Both are saltwater bivalves. Clams have a smooth shell, and oysters have a rough shell. Clams like to be in the mud, while oysters like to be up out of the muck, preferably attached to a rock. Clams move around during their life, while oysters like to stay in one place. Both are delicious.

Most of what Southern Cross raises are clams. They start out by spawning. While clams in the wild only spawn during certain seasons, in aquaculture farmers can manipulate the changes in the water temperature so that the clams think it's spawning season all year long. :-) They identify the males and females based on the fluids coming out of them. So they separate the girls from the boys and collect the eggs and the sperm. Then they mix sperm and eggs in the right proportions and create millions of tiny little clams.

After 24 hours, the baby clams are visible under a microscope. We saw them under a scope swimming around. Then they go into tanks where they get to feed on a diet of algae. Basically at this point they just look like colored water.

Over the next year or so, the clams keep growing, first in indoor tanks, then outside in larger tanks. Workers use screens to separate larger clams from smaller ones and keep the tanks filled with similar-sized clams. Water from the bay is pumped through the tanks, giving the clams the nutrients they need to grow.

After a few months, the clams are the size of small pebbles. Here's a tray with 40,000 to 50,000 clams.

Once they get a little bigger, they are ready to go into a mesh bag and go out into the Gulf of Mexico. A couple miles offshore are leased clam beds. Large mesh bags that contain around 10,000 clams are taken out and attached to the sea bottom. Clams like to be in the mud, so they're good with this. Here's our tour guide showing us one of the bags.

The clams spend about a year out in the gulf. During that time, they get visited by the aqua-farmers, who separate the larger clams from the smaller ones and put them into different bags. As it turns out, one clam will climb on the back of another to get a better shot at the food coming by in the water. But eventually they all get their chance to grow to full size. Once the clams are full size, the bags they are in are collected off the ocean floor for the last time, and the clams come ashore for sorting.

Here they go through an initial sorting, where whole clams are separated from empty half shells.

One guy feeds them into a rolling drum with lots of water. Most of the empty half shells fall out, and whole clams come out the end. But there's still a lot of hand work in separating whole clams from shells. These guys do this all day long.

Now the whole clams are in these large baskets. Next they get sorted by size, then bagged up and ready for sale.

The aquaculture farms here are wildly successful. At this time, 95% of the farm-raised clams in the US come from little Cedar Key. And, of course, you can get some of the best fresh clams at pretty much any restaurant here.

Want to learn more? Here's a link to the Southern Cross Sea Farms site. And here's a video that Southern Living did about the clamming industry in Cedar Key. Next time you enjoy a nice clam chowder, you'll remember that these clams probably grew up here in Cedar Key.

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel