Unlike the cities and towns that ring the Gulf of Mexico, wildlife communities in the gulf have had millions of years to adapt to hurricane weather. Even so, this year's hurricane season has left its mark on them too.
Hurricane Charlie, for example, crippled mangrove trees in Florida.
\It looks pretty bad now because there are a lot of broken limbs in the canopy and the canopy is gone,"" said Stephen Bortone, director of the Conservation Foundation marine lab in Captiva, a small Florida island in the Gulf of Mexico. The foundation preserves environmentally sensitive land on and around the island.
The trees should recover their leaves in less than a month, but in the meantime sun exposure is heating the watery habitat below. As the water's temperature climbs, its oxygen levels decline, a change that might force out some wildlife species, Bortone said.
In addition, some mangroves lost a year's worth of tree seedlings when the hurricane blew immature seeds off trees, he said.
""If the storm had come in another month, in say October, most of those seedlings would have survived,"" Bortone said.
While the damage done to a mangrove canopy is easy to see, assessing a hurricane's impact on a coral reef is more complex.
""Hurricanes are sort of a double-edged sword for coral reefs,"" said Robert Halley, a geologist at the United States Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Fla. Moderate hurricanes can actually benefit a coral reef by breaking and dispersing pieces of coral, some of which grow and form new coral, but a severe hurricane can ruin reefs.
Pollution and coastal development have rendered ecosystems in the gulf more vulnerable to hurricane damage. In the 1970s and '80s when there were relatively few hurricanes, Americans heavily developed the gulf coast, said Abby Sallenger, an oceanographer at the USGS. Run-off from development, combined with other pollution, have threatened coral reefs and weakened their ability to recover from hurricane damage, Halley said.
The environmental impact of this season's hurricanes is still largely unknown. In Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, for example, coral reefs were probably severely damaged by Hurricane Ivan, but little information has been gathered. Bortone acknowledged biologists are still unprepared to measure the impact of a hurricane.
""We'll make minute measurements on a daily basis ... and we'll do that for years,"" he said. ""(And then) one hurricane does maybe 100 years' worth of change.""
