It's not safe to go into the water. Or into the woods. Or to stay in the house, for that matter. And it's all our fault. [Times art: Don Morris]

By TOM ZUCCO

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 22, 2001

There's no way to delay
that trouble coming every day.

- Frank Zappa

Something's going on here.

You might not realize it, but a disturbing pattern is developing throughout Florida. And it apparently has nothing to do with Katherine Harris.

Consider what has happened since June 21, the first day of summer:

A 43-year-old woman was attacked by an alligator while she swam at a local nudist resort. Two weeks later, a 22-year-old woman walking her dog on a beach near Jacksonville also was attacked by a gator.

Heavy winds from a severe thunderstorm knocked a utility pole onto a Spring Hill woman's Nissan Maxima, trapping her inside as the car burst into flames. The woman managed to crawl out unharmed.

An 8-year-old boy had his arm torn off by a bull shark while wading in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola. A few days later, a surfer was bitten on the left foot by a shark 8 miles east of where the boy was attacked.

More than 30 sinkholes have opened up in a seven-block area of Spring Hill in the past month. And officials say the problem may be spreading.

A sudden gust of wind caused a woman and her daughter to fall to their deaths in a parasailing accident.

What's causing all this wrath-of-God havoc? Whom do we blame for the summer of our discontent?

You don't have to look far.

It's you and me.

We've subjected Florida to decades of overdevelopment, overfishing, overcrowding and over-everything else-ing. The state has been pushed, shoved, slapped around and insulted. And then it was stripped, poisoned, burned, dredged and, in some areas, completely paved over.

Now, it's payback time.

"There are just so many more people here," said Gary Morse, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "So it's more likely there's going to be more interaction going on between people and animals, and more likely to be more accidents."

About 3,000 people move to Florida every day, pushing the state's population to about 15-million. Eventually, many of us will wander onto a golf course, go for a swim or do something outdoors.

This is Florida's chance to get even.

"We don't have any more gators now than 15-20 years ago," Morse said, "but we do have considerably more people."

Do the math.

Some of what's happening can't be blamed on the boom in the population. Some of it -- the West Nile virus, colonies of giant jellyfish in the gulf -- feels like cosmic justice, as if Mother Nature were spanking us for all the naughty things we've done. We haven't even mentioned the usual tourist attractions -- stingrays, lightning, mosquitoes, ticks, sea lice, wildfires, cockroaches . . . and it gets worse when you go outside.

And yet we keep pushing our luck. As if we don't have enough dangerous plants and animals here, we have to import more.

"We have Australian jellyfish in the gulf, eels in canals in Miami, mussels that are also not native to Florida," Morse said. "People are bringing in these exotic animals, and that leads to some serious problems."

Florida is an ideal environment for many of these non-native animals and plants, which can devastate the native populations and cause a ripple effect involving the entire food chain.

"It just messes everything up," Morse said. "It throws nature's attempt to manage itself into a tizzy."

Some imported animals will outlast us all.

"Wild hogs," Morse said. "They've been here 500 years, and we'll never eradicate them."

And then there are the Oscars. Not the statues. The aggressive tropical fish that many people keep in aquariums. (They really, really like us!) When their owners want to get rid of them, they dump them in canals in South Florida. Along with the eels.

"The Oscars have out-competed the native species and have taken over," Morse said. "So we've had to bring in peacock bass from South America to try to control them."

You can see where this is leading . . . what controls the bass?

We're thinking sharks.

[Times photo: Kevin White] Sinkholes such as this one in a retention pond on the east side of Mariner Boulevard are becoming common in Spring Hill.

But hey, don't let us give you the idea leaving your house is a bad idea.

Charles Lee was born in Miami in 1950 and has seen the state endure what he calls "the good, the bad and the ugly." Lee, senior vice president of Audubon of Florida, says it only makes sense that we're seeing more gator and shark attacks, more accidents on the water and more sinkholes.

Even so, while the number of people bitten by a shark or a gator is increasing every year (more than two dozen so far this year), only a tiny fraction of our population ever gets nibbled on.

"There have been surfers who've had their feet bitten for quite a while," Lee said. "But it never had the notoriety it has now. We had that one grave incident in Pensacola where the boy was bitten, and that has whetted the appetite of everyone in the media to look for shark bite stories.

"I knew kids in high school who were bitten by sharks while they were surfing off Miami in the 1960s, and it didn't make the 6 o'clock news."

But that's not a signal to let down your guard. There are subtle signs things may really be getting out of hand.

The Naples (Fla.) Daily News told its readers the other day that the newspaper was delivered late because a frog short-circuited switching equipment inside a transformer at the paper. Electricity to the computers was shut down, causing a two-hour delay in the press run. The small front-page item announcing the mishap could also be construed as the frog's obituary.

[Photo: AP] Australian spotted jellyfish gorge on fish eggs and larvae in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even the simple act of eating can be dangerous. The Center for Science in the Public Interest recommended recently that people avoid oysters raw if they (the oysters) come from the Gulf of Mexico. The bacteria the raw oysters carry kill 10 to 15 people a year.

Which means oysters kill more people than sharks. (So dive right in!)

So maybe you should just stay inside this summer.

Don't even answer your phone.

Although it doesn't qualify as a nature-versus-humans collision . . . well, maybe it does . . . Times reporter Colleen Jenkins was at her desk the other day, minding her own business, when she got an unsolicited phone call from fitness diva Richard Simmons. He shouted everything he said.

And he sang to her. Numerous times.

Simmons was trying to locate a Pasco County woman who mistakenly thought he had stood her up during her appearance on a talk show.

Though traumatized, Jenkins did not require hospitalization.

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