Bait and Switch

Mitigation is negotiated on a case-by-case basis, but if 75 percent of a 300-acre wetlands is in melaleuca, the developer sometimes gets to destroy 200 acres of the wetlands if he agrees to strip melaleuca from the remaining 100 acres. If the infestation is greater than 75 percent, the agencies figure the wetland is worthless, and the developer can sometimes destroy the whole thing without even token mitigation. According to a Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council review of wetland projects permitted in just the Estero Bay watershed (adjacent to Cocohatchee Slough and in what the Fish and Wildlife Service calls the wood stork’s core foraging area), this happened 18 times between May 2006 and June 2007.

The Mirasol property—also in the heart of the wood stork’s core foraging area—is fenced with barbed wire. Still, Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary’s Jason Lauritsen and I were able to capture from it two of the most important wildlife species in Florida. The first, plucked from a sickly melaleuca leaf, was a gray weevil slightly smaller than a garden spider. It crawled up my forefinger, anchoring its hooked feet and briefly refusing to leave when I tried to pry it off. The larvae—black and slimy as slugs but with only one horn—had left chlorophyll-depleted trails on the melaleuca leaves.

We found only the larvae of the other species—a tiny fly called a psyllid—swaddled in white flocculence and the size, shape, and color of the hard interior of a corn kernel. They barely moved, and they left the same trails. Next day, just outside the southeast boundary of Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, in one of grossest melaleuca infestations in the state, Cornell found adult psyllids. They were the same shape, size, and color as the larvae. But they had wings that I couldn’t see even with reading glasses, and they launched at warp speed when I tweaked their butts with a pine needle.

Both leaf-eating insects evolved with melaleuca in Australia, and both were released in Florida as biological controls—the weevil in 1997, the psyllid in 2002. Multiplying like fruit flies, they swept across the state faster than anyone dared hope. By disrupting photosynthesis they deplete melaleuca roots of carbohydrates, thereby stressing the trees so that they’re far more susceptible to fire, drought, and disease—most notably a native rust fungus. Seedlings are particularly vulnerable. In some cases survival has been reduced by 80 percent. Biocontrol agents offer the only real hope of naturalizing many invasive exotics, and ecological dangers have been all but eliminated by stringent pre-release “starvation tests,” in which an agent is offered all manner of similar native vegetation. It passes by starving to death.

Despite its melaleuca, the Mirasol land is beautiful and relatively healthy, an imperiled wet habitat type called “hydric pine flatwoods.” There are broad stands of saw palmetto, wet prairies rife with native grasses and sedges, wax myrtle, swamp maple, pond cypress, and plenty of openings where sunlight penetrates to the forest floor. South Florida slash pine still comprises much of the canopy. The weevils and psyllids have done much to naturalize the melaleuca. A decade ago the gray, peeling, paperlike bark was unblemished, the trunks ramrod straight. Now the bark is scarred, the trunks gnarled and kinky. “Melaleuca can’t dominate like it used to,” said Lauritsen. “It no longer has the ability to shade out all the competition. The leaves are browner. The forest has a whole different feel.”

One might assume the Corps, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the South Florida Water Management District would take into account the dramatic effect of these biocontrol agents in the joint formula by which they supposedly divine the value of wetlands and calculate proper mitigation for their destruction. But no. The data on which they base their formula predate release of even the weevils. So wetlands are all the more undervalued and mitigation all the more overvalued.

When a developer wants to dredge or fill wetlands in the habitat of an endangered or threatened species and has not demonstrated proper “avoidance” or “minimization” or offered reasonable mitigation, the Fish and Wildlife Service is obligated to ask the Corps to deny the dredge-and-fill permit. The service rarely asks, and when it does the Corps frequently ignores it.

Under the Endangered Species Act the service is required to write a “biological opinion” (BiOp) on how a development will affect a listed species. When, in the course of preparing that document, it finds that a project will jeopardize a species’ existence, it must issue a “jeopardy opinion.” This means the project can’t happen unless the developer implements “reasonable and prudent alternatives.” Service biologists inform me that the Bush administration has ordered the agency not to issue jeopardy opinions.