FWC to test water after thousands of fish turn up dead in Biscayne Bay

MIAMI – Every morning, Kathryn Mikesell starts her day with a swim in Biscayne Bay next to her home in Morningside, but she was greeted with an unexpected sight when she went for her swim on Monday and then again on Tuesday.

“All of a sudden, we were looking around us and we realized that we were in a sea of dead fish,” she said.

Local 10′s Louis Aguirre went to the area Tuesday morning and saw hundreds of dead fish of every shape, size and species.

Mikesell took out her cellphone and started documenting what she was witnessing before sending the video to the Miami Waterkeeper nonprofit organization, which took a sample of the water for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to analyze and check for toxins.

“We just literally started to pick up fish and pushing fish away from us and we were like, “Oh my goodness, something is wrong,‘” Mikesell said. “So we cut our swim short.”

Environmentalists fear this is no mystery, but rather the ominous sign they’ve been warning about for years -- that we are killing Biscayne Bay.

“This is it, this is what we’ve been warning about and we’re starting to see fish die. We’ve already seen our seagrass die and this is the big red flashing arrow that we have a problem,” Rachel Silverstein, of Miami Waterkeeper, said. “We are beyond the time to act. Something terrible has already happened, but we need to prevent this from becoming an emergency across even more of the bay.”

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About the Author:

Louis Aguirre is an Emmy-award winning journalist who anchors weekday newscasts and serves as WPLG Local 10’s Environmental Advocate.