Rodents apparently drowned when Hurricane Isaac swamped Gulf Coast.
As silver linings go, this one stinks.
Bad.
Capt. Sonny Schindler has never seen anything like it, the thousands of dead nutria pushing into the west end of the Mississippi Sound after apparently being drowned by Hurricane Isaac’s storm surge.“When we got our boats back out in the Sound that first time after Isaac (Friday, Aug. 31), there was at least one on every wave top,” said Schindler, one of four captains in the Shore Thing Charter fleet in Bay St. Louis and Waveland. “I swear, they look like big, black balloons with arms and legs.”
Those wave-riding carcasses began hitting the beaches over the weekend, creating a horrific scene, a terrible smell and a definite health hazard.
“They apparently are everywhere in Hancock County,” Schindler said. “I haven’t been down to the beaches myself, and from what I hear I don’t want to go.
“I’ve talked to several friends who said they had driven down (Beach Boulevard in Waveland and Bay St. Louis), and they said you just can’t take it. The smell is awful.
The beaches, roads along the beaches and even some streets providing access to beaches have been closed while crews in protective suits work to collect and dispose of the rotting corpses.
“We don’t want anybody out here in the stuff,” Hancock County Supervisor David Yarborough told the Associated Press. “They’re actually starting to swell up and bust. It smells really bad. So, any sightseers, you might want to second guess this one before you come out.”
Yarborough said removing the carcasses is proving a challenge, since “as they’re picking them up, they are bursting open.”
According to The Sun-Herald, the federal contractor U.S. Environmental Services has been hired by local and state officials to aid in beach cleanup. Workers are loading the nutria by pitchforks and shovels into front-end loaders, and the remains are being taken to the Pecan Grove Landfill in Harrison County for disposal.
When asked about the number of dead rodents, Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Robbie Wilbur said today (Sept. 5) that the sheer amount of dead nutria has caused officials to change their way of estimating.
Instead of actual body count, they have switched to weight.
“It’s hard to say for sure right now,” Wilbur said. “Estimates are there will be over 20,000 carcasses, but that is unclear now. Eventually, the totals will be numerated in tons when they’re all disposed.”
Wilbur said the bulk of the nutria have come ashore in Hancock County, with a smaller amount in Harrison County, where over 16,000 tons of dead animals were removed from beaches on Saturday and Sunday, with more arriving on the waves.
Only those nutria landing on the beaches are being removed. MDEQ officials said those washing up in the marsh will be left to nature.
Nutria are classified as rodents, but are semi-aquatic. They were imported to Louisiana in the 1930s, brought in by fur traders/farmers from the nutria’s native range in South America. Many escaped the farms while some were simply turned loose when the farms failed financially.
The animal’s ability to procreate is phenomenal: Females reach sexual maturity at just four months of age, and females are able to breed within 48 hours of giving birth to a litter.
Combine that amazing reproductive rate with the collapse in the demand for nutria fur in the 1980, and the species quickly became an environmental nightmare.
As much a mess and a problem as the dead nutria are, it is being labeled by environmentalists as a silver lining from Isaac on the same scale that the storm is being credited for drought-busting.
Nutria feed on the roots of marsh plants, leading to erosion and loss of wetlands. Mississippi DEQ describes the nutria as “one of the Gulf South’s most notorious invasive species, wreaking ecological havoc on native wetland vegetation and contributing to coastal erosion problems.”
MDEQ added that the damage is done by nutria “digging into thin soils and eating roots of marsh vegetation. As the vegetation dies, the fine-grained denuded soils become more vulnerable to erosion, eventually forming expanding holes in the marsh called eat-outs.”
In an unrelated matter, Wilbur said Bayou Casotte and adjacent waters of the Mississippi Sound within 1,000 feet of the mouth of Bayou Casotte remained closed until further notice.
Bayou Casotte is a popular fishing area in Jackson County east of Pascagoula.
MDEQ and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources issued the closure Sunday after a fish kill was reported. While seafood is not considered to be contaminated, fishermen are advised not to consume any seafood collected from the area until further notice.
The precautionary closure was issued to protect the public from potentially harmful water and does not affect navigation.
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