Escape to Blue Spring

I'm writing this on a dreary Ohio evening. I've just returned from a four-mile run and a singing session in the Waxler Church at twilight. It's the most I can do to fight the gloom. The boys are at a StupidBowl party, something that is frankly so far down on my scale of Appealing Things that it's flatlining. I'm wondering if I can conjure a little of the magic of the day Liam and I threw our suitcases and backpacks in the car, wound down through the hamlet of Bonn, Ohio, where we spotted a cat verrrry high up in a tree. I think this is one of those situations where it's a lot easier to run up than to ooch your way down...yiiiikes! I do not envy that kitty. But trust it got back down...they usually do.

 We fought our way through a sudden snowstorm to Canton/Akron airport 

sat on a Southwest jet for 2.5 hours, rented a car in Orlando, and headed to Blue Springs State Park for the final 45 minutes of the day before night fell.

I'm glad I didn't look at the map before embarking on our journey, because in no way is Blue Springs on the way to Titusville, as I had imagined. All I knew is I wanted to show my boy some manatees.

In that, we were not disappointed.

Consider the contrast between the monochrome, frigid world we inhabit, and the limpid, 72-degree turquoise green waters of Blue Spring. We certainly did. 

Liam shrugged into shorts and I rolled up my pants and peeled off layers of shirtage

and we walked with bare arms! in the evening warmth.

Gazing into the water, we watched the manatees gently lolling, rising every so often to exhale, phaaaaaa! and inhale.... thwipp!

and it all had such a surreal quality that we couldn't stop sighing along with the enormous placid sirenians.

I set about trying to get photos of their nostrils and eyes because let's face it, the rest of the manatee is but a vast and beautiful expanse of gentle blubber, ending in paddles

I squealed when I got this shot because it shows the nostrils slamming shut.

Let's have a closer look.

and that my dears is about all the spout you're going to get out of a manatee. I wish I could have gotten a better photo of the eye, because the eyelids close more like a sphincter than lids. Hard to describe, but the eye looks like it's at the center of a many-petaled flower or a star. It's beautiful.

before she sounds in the four-foot depths of this warm spring. The manatees are here for the geothermal upwelling which warms the water to a constant 72 degrees year round.

The fish like it, too.

Most prominent: the invasive exotic blue tilapia, Oreochromis aureus, native to Israel and escaped from fish farms and distributed throughout the Deep South and Central America now. I hadn't known the tilapia was a member of the cichlid family (the darlings of aquariists). I have eaten my share of them, especially in Central America. Pretty good eating, but a bit mucky-tasting to my palate. 

A common snook, Centropomis undecimalis. A native predatory fish, prized as a gamefish. It did look a bit lurky there. 

Longnose gar, Lepisosteus osseus. Gar are super cool looking fish, also predaceous and well-armed with snaggly teeth.

I stared at this one for a long time, and couldn't make it out to be anything but a pacu, which I recognized from my hours of staring into aquariums. Pacus are large tetras (charachins) native to South America. (Piranhas are also charachins.) I understand that in Papua New Guinea, these hefty fish have been known to rise up and neatly remove the testicles of skinny-dippers. One would presume that, in these fruit and nut-eating fish, this is a case of mistaken identity. Or a semantic error.

That has got to be terrible. Fatal, even. Eeesh! Wear your swim trunks!

Speaking of dangerous, we found this gentleman moored to the shore, trying to look like a sodden log.

Our first gator of the trip, a nice big'un. We would see many more, since the weather would be near perfect the whole week. Ahhhh thank you Florida. I understand it was craptastic the two weeks before our visit. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Like when you catch a manatee yawning, or something. No. It couldn't be yawning underwater. 

Maybe it's laughing. Yeah, that's it. Making pacu jokes. Get a load of those papillae. I have been honored to be mawed by young captive manatees in Brasil, and I can tell you that the suction power of that velvety mouth is awesome.  I tried to stay in front of the molars...which reminds me...is manatee on my Bite List? 

I felt very lucky not only to see manatee lips, but to finally be SLEEVELESS, and best of all to have a traveling companion for the week like Liam. Someone who can dig the scene with me, who makes me laugh. I'm grateful that his school doesn't object when we occasionally yank him out for travel and enrichment. Better than throwing a pinata to the elephants. They know he's going to learn a ton of things Ohio can't teach him. Like about pacus. He just ran out of the studio, doubled over. Keep 'em thinking, my dad always said.

Far too soon, the sun sank on Blue Spring, and we turned toward dinner and Titusville.

We heard cricket music, the sweet exhalations of manatees in the gathering dark. And we were so glad to be in Florida. On the way into Titusville, we stopped to find Comet Lovejoy in the inky sky. I found it in a matter of seconds, having learned where it was back home, shivering in the cold. We got back in the car and hadn't gone 100 yards down the road when a huuuge orange fireball exploded into the sky. I'd never seen anything like it. I thought I'd seen my first UFO.  We finally realized that they must've launched a rocket from Canaveral. Atlas 5, with a Navy communications satellite on baord. And we were in the perfect place to observe the launch. Our trip was starting most auspiciously.

Blue Springs Manatees

High on our agenda for our Florida trip was a visit to Blue Springs, a bit west of Orlando.  This is a classic limestone (karst) spring, carved out by upwellings of sweet water.  We devoted our last morning to it, as a sweet cherry atop the luscious sundae Sunday of our trip. It was cold and foggy when we arrived, making us envy the manatees stacked like cordwood in the pellucid 72 degree water of the river.  My first wild manatees, anywhere. Yes, I'd seen the Amazonian freshwater manatee in Brazil and Guyana, but only in captive situations. Heck, I'd gotten right down and hugged them!

I was overwhelmed by seeing free-living wild manatees--so very many--I counted 80 in one turn of my head! Yeah, yeah, I was bawling. I'd waited a long time to see my first wild sirenians, and I'd strained my eyes peering into the muddy waters of many a tropical river trying. This was too easy. It was like they were waiting for a bus, and the bus was us!

While we waited for the fog to clear, we looked beneath the observation dock. Some native Florida gar joined a snook, hanging as if on strings in the water. My GarGuru, FloridaCracker, advises that there may be two species of gar here, so he advised me to go against my Science Chimp instincts and not get too specific. 

The spring was almost choked with tilapia, an African escapee from fish farms. They're cichlids, related to those darlings of freshwater aquaria. Pretty good eating, but it doesn't look like we're going to catch up with their reproductive rate any time soon. Sigh. Fortunately (or unfortunately for Blue Springs), tilapia are confined to waters that stay above 60 degrees year-round, meaning that (so far) only Florida has to deal with them, and, outside of extreme southern Florida, generally around power plant outflows.

Farm-raised tilapia fed on corn may be fattier than bacon or hamburger. (Remember when everyone found out that the fish sandwich at Mickey D's is the worst thing you can order? That was because of the way they fry it, though.) And,

 interestingly enough, commercially farmed tilapia are subjected to testosterone baths as young fry, turning them all into males. In this way, pisciculturists can ensure they raise an even-age batch of harvest-sized fish, rather than having to sort the offspring of their inevitable pairings. These look pretty even-aged to me--where are the juveniles? Dunno.

FloridaCracker says tilapia make huge, meter-wide bowl-shaped nests, crowding out native sunfishes. Bah. Why do so many escaped exotics have to live so darn large?

Tilapia have made it to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's 100 World's Worst Alien Invasive Species, having been introduced into tropical waters all over the planet.  They're the big boxy gray fish in this photo.

The blackish banjo-shaped catfish are vermiculated sailfin catfish, native to Amazonia and known in the aquarium trade as Plecostomus catfish, or "plecos." One guess where those came from. I'll give you a hint. When I was a kid, I had one in my tiny 5 gallon aquarium along with the mollies and platies, and it got about 8" long so we gave it to the neighbors, who flushed it down their toilet when it got too big for their 20-gallon tank. Never give anything to your neighbors if you care about it.

In an Amazonian fish market in Manaus, Brazil, I saw Plecostomus catfish for sale, stacked like firewood, upside down, their sucker mouths gasping for air. They were about a yard long. I felt bad about that for years until I saw these.

Why do we import things like this, to put in little tanks and then, when they no longer fit in the tanks, to put in our crystal springs, where they dig the sides out and erode them, making their nests? Why do people keep Burmese pythons and then, when they're too big for the  apartment,  turn them loose in the Everglades, to proliferate to terrifying levels? That's just what we do. Dumb stuff like that. Genies get out of bottles and there is no stuffing them back. Especially when the genies like Florida's subtropical climate.

There were other creatures in with the manatees, which caused the big sirenians no concern whatsoever.

This was the youngest gator we saw, still carrying its banded tail.

It was about two feet long.

Even the big gator seemed not to carry a threat to the gentle mammals, who cruised right under it.

Blue Springs State Park is a magical place. Just the original homestead with the new sun beaming through its Tillandsia-draped tree...oh my goodness. We didn't have time for the house tour. Well, anyway, the Science Chimp can rarely be found on historic house tours--she's usually digging around in the leaf litter instead.

We had only one morning, this misty morning burning off to bright sun, before we had to go back to freezing, iron-gray Ohio.

We soaked it up as best we could.  More manatees anon!