Background to website about the ecology of Tidy Island
Tidy Island has a unique presence in Sarasota Bay; it is very different from the barrier islands that separate Sarasota Bay from the Gulf (Anna Maria Island and Longboat Key in both a geological and historic sense.
Topics
Living on Tidy island makes it easy to decide on the list of topics:
Geology – Very different from the nearby barrier islands. This difference created difficulties for early developers and spared Tidy Island from the destruction of coastal habitat inflicted on most of the Bay.
Mangroves – Tidy Island has every kind of mangrove found in Florida: red, black, white, and buttonwood. About two-thirds of the island is mangrove swamp, which owned by New College of Florida for research purposes.
Salt flats – These were created by the 1921 Tampa Bay Hurricane. They are ecologically unique and quite strange, but will not be here much longer because of increasing sea level. The hurricane also created the mangrove swamp, which is gradually changing Tidy Island into a peninsula.
Red Tides – When this website was first set up (2020) this was just another topic Tidy Island topic. Now it has become the site’s primary focus. The 2018 red tide had a profound effect on Tidy Island, as it did along all of the southwest Florida coast. After I ran out of new things to say about Tidy Island, I kept the website alive thinking that a time might come when it would be useful as a repository for material relating to red tides in particular and, more generally, to research about Karenia brevis, the dinoflagellate that causes Florida red tides. That time has come.