By Belize Live News Staff: Here’s the detail that changes everything about the Belize River die-off. Crocodiles and hicatee turtles breathe air. Whatever killed them, it wasn’t the water running out of oxygen. It was something in the water itself.
That’s the assessment of Dr. Donald McKnight, research director at the Savannah Field Station, who went out and did his own investigating after the massive kill that left the river littered with dead fish, hicatee and crocs. The necropsies sealed it for him. The hicatee’s liver “was very yellow and showed signs of toxicity,” he said. Livers don’t fail like that from bad luck.
And forget the idea that the river just bloomed itself to death. The Belize River flows too fast for the big dangerous algae blooms, McKnight explained. Those happen in stagnant water. His theory? A bloom built up in a retention pond somewhere, brewing its toxins, and then that pond emptied into the river. The organic load and the toxic chemical aren’t competing explanations, he said. One causes the other.
So where did it come from? That’s where it gets delicate. Chief Environmental Officer Anthony Mai has already said the speculation points to agricultural operations in the area, including an apparently illegal rice farm, and McKnight walked the trails himself. The rice farm at Laboring Creek is cleared right up to the water’s edge, which he flatly called a problem. And a canal he believes comes off a nearby property, the same one Baboon Sanctuary residents found gushing days before, greeted him with fish skeletons along its banks and a dead tilapia floating in it. “Maybe that’s the source,” he said. Maybe.
Nobody has been officially blamed, McKnight himself says it’s not clear where this originated, and no operation in the area has responded in the report we’ve seen. Piecing this together after the fact, he admits, is proving really challenging.
But one thing is no longer in doubt for the scientists: this wasn’t nature. Something got into the river that shouldn’t have been there, it killed on a massive scale including one of the rarest turtles on Earth, and it happened in the same river that flows toward the Double Run plant. Somebody put something in Belize’s water. The only question left is who.
What do you think, Belize? Will anyone actually be held accountable for the river? Let us know in the comments.
