BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. — Protection often comes at a cost.
And the true price that parts of Southwest Florida have paid is only just becoming clear a year after Hurricane Ian hit.
"I think for me personally, I hit January 1 [2023], and I thought, 'Oh good, we're turning a corner,'" said Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) professor Dr. Edwin Everham.
Everham and other researchers with FGCU have been studying a patch of mangroves in Bonita Springs since Hurricane Irma hit—to see what lessons can learned about resiliency.
It's an area ABC Action News toured a month after Hurricane Ian hit and one where we struggled to find much damage.
"You know it's actually a good problem because if the trees had been more impacted, it's easy to say, 'Snapped off dead. Snapped off dead. Snapped off dead. And what we got is alive, alive, alive,'" said Everham in October of 2022.
But a quick tour in early August of 2023 showed the beating this ecosystem really took.
"What just happened? You don't fully understand the day after the hurricane. There are things that will occur over a period of at least months that are a delayed impact [from] that kind of disturbance event," said Everham.
The belief is that the storm surge from Hurricane Ian left behind sediment that slowly suffocated many of the trees in that patch.
But in the midst of that death, we also found baby mangrove shoots.
"I don't see a live white mangrove higher than our knees," said Everham.
"Is that scary to you?" asked ABC Action News Reporter Rochelle Alleyne.
"I mean, it's a pattern. It's really hopeful to see that they're there less than our knees, right? But it reminds me of how catastrophic Ian was," said Everham.
As researchers watch and see if those babies grow to their full potential, they're left with two reminders: climate change puts nature in a constant state of adaptation, and if we want nature to help protect us from the next big storm, it will need our help.
"So, we just have to recognize that the adaptations that they have to respond to things they saw a thousand years ago, they're seeing in a different context. So, I am not one to say, 'Nature can take care of itself.' Because we've screwed it up in a lot of ways, so, I think our obligation is to try to better understand what used to work, what's not working now, what's still working now, and then we gotta put our hands back into these systems and help heal them," said Everham.
