ANNIVERSARY
20
FAU HARBOR BRANCH AT 50
JASON HOOK
Getting ready to head out from the FAU Harbor Branch campus, are left to right, Srinivas Kolluru, postdoctoral fellow working in remote sensing; Erin
Rowley, graduate student working in Marine Ecosystem Conservation; Ariadna Rojas Corzo, graduate research assistant in the Fisheries Ecology and Conservation
Lab; and Laurent M. Chérubin, assistant research professor, physical oceanography.
Lapointe’s hypothesis and blamed reef die-offs on overfishing.
Lapointe’s views have since become widely accepted in
the 21st century.
FAU TO THE RESCUE
All the Harbor Branch old-timers recall how financial
hard times in the mid-2000s led to Florida Atlantic University
absorbing the research facility. This has reinvigorated
Harbor Branch, offered uninterrupted operational funding
and released funds to completely renovate and upgrade the
makes up 70% of the lagoon may
require wholesale seagrass planting
to recover.
HOPE FOR LAGOON
He likes to think “we can turn this
around,” noting that a half-cent sales
tax in Brevard goes toward muck removal
and shoreline restoration, both
of which should help. He also cites
Tampa Bay as an example of how
tighter restrictions on use of nitrogenbased
fertilizers and more advanced
Brian Lapointe has spent
30 years researching the
effects of excess nitrogen
caused by sewage outfalls
on corals in the Florida
Keys and elsewhere.
sewage treatment can bring a water
body back to life.
“After 30 years of these measures and even though the
TANJU MISHARA
watershed there has seen more than 1 million new people
Lapointe, who wrote controversial papers on how human activity was changing
coming there, overall nitrogen loading has actually gone
the very chemistry of the sea, surfaces in the middle of a mat of sargassum
seaweed in the Caribbean.
down,” Hanisak says.
Lapointe, who was inspired to become an ocean research
scientist after watching the Jacques Cousteau TV shows at
age 9 in West Palm Beach, is still enthusiastic about what he
does. He began doing field research in the Florida Keys in
the early 1980s, which he refers to as “a dream job that has
evolved into an almost 40-year career studying nutrients and
algal growth.”
Lapointe recalls the controversial papers he wrote in the
1980s that suggested how human activity was changing the
very chemistry of the seas. Many fellow scientists dismissed >>