MICHAEL WINES/NEW YORK TIMES
MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare.
A year later, the inquiry into those deaths has become a cross-species murder mystery, a trail of hundreds of deaths across one-third of the Indian River estuary, one of the richest marine ecosystems in the continental United States.
READ MORE
Indian River Guardian 
The New York Times article is right about the urgency of the issue. We, however, have to recognize the sad reality as documented on the front page of our daily newspaper today when our elected representative, Bill “Birther” Posey claims actions is needed for the lagoon but he refuses to be a part of the solution. Just the funding that he approved for NASCAR sponsonorship in the DOD budget would be a good investment of our tax dollars.