bath and Bay is just this iconic Texas Bay system really well known for its fishery everyone should care about baffing whether they're an angler or not simply because it's a really unique system looks Cloud here recently we've had some tussles with water quality issues things that are happening way Upstream we want to keep an eye on studies have identified as being an incubator for the brown tide the water quality issues we don't want to have spillover into the rest of the upper lagona Madre eve
rything's intertwined taking care of the land is taking care of the [Music] water you see what's being directly impacted which is the fish the seagrass beds the bird Community if you care about the Laguna Madre and the wild Texas coast in general we have to address the water quality issues in Baff & Bay [Music] the mission of the heart Research Institute is to study the Gulf of Mexico and address [Music] problems well we're here because we're trying to document water quality conditions in Baff a
nd [Music] Bay we've been working with the community for the past 10 years to understand what the water quality problems are and now to find solutions to those water quality problems today we were out sampling a lot of different indicators that tell us how healthy the water quality is so today we're making measurements of salinity and I'll drop it in the water how much dissolved oxygen there is how salty the bay is and how good a habitat T it is for fish and seagrass temperature 30.6 dissolved o
xygen percent 80.4 we're looking at things like the amount of algae in the water we'll drop instruments like a ski disc looks like an Oreo cookie and that tells us how much light is making it down to the bottom for the seagrass beds disappears about right there 40 cm for second and one of the issues we have here in bath and Bay is too much algae growing in the water so the light doesn't get down far enough for the seagrass at times and then we have seagrass die offs from long time Anglers we've
heard a lot of great anecdotal information about what the bay used to be like you used to have Crystal Clear Water you know you used to be able to drop a lur in the water and you could see it almost down to the bottom very is the fishery was just incredible for its trophy trout and then sometime in the 880s the switch kind of flipped okay let's start water collection the water samples that we collect and all that data that we're getting it helps us to really understand when and where we're havin
g water quality issues and that's really important because then that helps us to hone in on where we need to address those issues we are here in Laguna slada and we're going to do a additional water testing here awesome thank you good luck out there lto all right see you in a bit I have two sites that I sample out of out here and then one in bath and Bay there's a specific phytoplankton species known as the Texas brown tide Studies have identified this certain section in this tributary as being
an incubator for this species the brown tide is a ecosystem disruptive species so it causes a lot of ecological effects bad for the environment I'm collecting water samples so that we can process the water analyze the nutrients and also determine the phytoplankton composition there's a lot of phytoplankton in the water that can be harmful to the environment and the humans around it and we want to be able to hopefully catch these instances before they become a much larger [Music] issue it's just
you know me and the kayak depending on the weather it can be harsh cuz it is you know humid and hot out here so tired I'm more driven by trying to make a change and that starts off with learning about our environment and the science that we're doing back at [Music] HRI water samples that we bring back we analyze for a lot of different chemicals as well as looking at the types of algae that are down there in the water this is a piece of a serpulid reef found throughout Baffin Bay and it's one of
the few places in the world that we find reefs like this although serpulid worms build the reefs other fauna live on the reefs feed upon the reefs breed within the reefs you can look at one small couple of centimeter piece of reef and find just thousands and thousands of other creatures they play such an important role in the bay in general because of just how much life they support there what it looks like is that the reefs are shrinking and degrading in so we need to get a better grasp on the
current extent of those reefs and how to move forward with restoring [Music] them my name is Ethan GS I'm the ecosystem leader for the upper lagona Madre Team part of the coastal Fisheries division Texas Parks and Wildlife our task is to do the routine monitoring of our phase to keep track of Fisheries so we collect Fisheries data to get a gauge of all the different species that are out there and what Anglers like to catch so we've got our bag same here we stretch it out 50 ft we want to make su
re we're doing it the exact same way so that all the data is comparable through time are you ready good to go Ethan all right let's do it bagss that helps us get data on juvenile fishes and some Bait fish fish species let's see what we've got in here oh we've got a juvenile black drum here just a little guy but he'll grow up to be a lot bigger got a mullet snapping shrimp little blue crab length is going to be 55 okay all right what other species do we have and then the ba trols we conduct those
in a little bit deeper water all right net deploy we'll go for 10 minutes dragging that along the bottom and we'll see what we catch we're picking up a lot of shrimp um and other Bait fish our monitoring programs have been around a long long time we can see whether populations are on the increase or decrease and with that data we make regulation changes had some issues with with nutrient runoffs into the bay one of is 272 in general the fish population still seem to be really healthy despite so
me of those issues but it's things we really want to keep an eye on to make sure the sustainability of Baffin is kept in check what we've learned about the causes of the water quality degradation it essentially goes back to things that we're doing on the lands Around The Bay there's been a lot of really sophisticated Source tracking lately looking at pollution sources and surprisingly there's a big contribution from sewage so failing wastewater treatment plants and septic tanks but we also see c
ontributions from egg as well as storm water runoff this is a million and a half acre Watershed a lot of people don't recognize that what they do on their land will affect the bay we're in the middle of clayberg County my wife grew up down here but we really wanted to raise our family down here it's beautiful we're in ranching we're in the business of making money on beef but we also want to use cattle to create the best habitat we're going to be here for a long time and we can't do something th
at's going to have a short-term benefit we're building back these grasses then you're going to filter out any of the impurities that might flow into that water from a highway or from any kind of urbanization that might trickle its way through your property because as it flows off of our land it's going to make its way into the bay and into those public Waters ranchers farmers were the first line of defense cleaning that water as it moves out to those bigger bodies of water we started to figure o
ut what some of the challenges are so we have pulled together a group of community members it's called the Baff and Bay stakeholder group we started off in 2018 with about 10 people in a room and we have close to 300 community members on that stakeholder group now now our hope for bringing Baffin back is that it starts to turn back time and brings Baffin back to the way it used to be 20 30 40 years ago the water protection plan is basically a guide book for how to fix the bay taking care of the
land is taking care of the water we feel lucky to be able to work here and at least look after the Fisheries um we know that's so valuable to so many people it gives us a lot of Pride to be a part of keeping Baffin in the best shape possible it makes me appreciate Baff and Bay but also the communities that are directly impacted this is going to be a long-term program working with the cities and counties to address their Wastewater infrastructure bringing resources to land owners to fix their sep
tic tanks for example we're working with the Community to start implementing those Solutions education I think is [Music] key
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