The Naples Daily News has just completed a 15-part series on the troubles in the Gulf of Mexico and what might be done to solve them. This article is an overview of that series. For a day-by-day look at the series, go to the newspaper’s Web site at http://www.naplesnews.com/deeptrouble/.

The once teeming and vibrant Gulf of Mexico is gravely sick by any reckoning.

Gary Burris, a Gulf fisherman turned environmental filmmaker, compares the Gulf today with the one he knew as a fisherman in the 1970s and documented as a filmmaker for CNN in the 1980s.

"I'm writing the epitaph," he said of his current work. "We have gone over the edge of sustainability."

He said fishermen agree, in words that are less than scientific, that things are bad.

Water quality is abysmal, they say. They must work harder for fewer fish, and the habitat for their catch is disappearing at an alarming rate in an industry worth $692 million in 2002.

The fishermen were the first to report a mysterious black-water event that prompted the Naples Daily News to launch a 15-month look at water quality, industrial pollution, population growth, habitat loss and their effects on the Gulf and the people living along its shores.

There are several hot spots for illness around the Gulf, including a region called Cancer Alley. It is the stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is packed with refineries, chemical plants and sick people.

Dozens of polluted Superfund sites still dot the Gulf rim, 23 years after the cleanup program began. Ocean dumping still occurs, with Florida officials spraying into the Gulf millions of gallons of a toxic cocktail from a failed phosphate plant near Tampa.

Coral reefs along the Florida Keys are in near-collapse in many places, and business is declining to match. Part of what's at stake Gulf-wide is a $20 billion annual tourism industry that is growing nervous because of more frequent and intense red tides.

There is a Dead Zone off the mouth of the Mississippi River that most years is larger than New Jersey or Massachusetts. Its annual summer incarnation suffocates once-abundant life on the sea floor. Because of its size, some consider it the poster child for a declining Gulf.

There are many smaller dead zones identified by fishermen and scientists that ring that gulf and, for at least part of the year, chase sea life to deeper water.

Numbers show neglect

The problems show up in numbers most starkly:

• Compared with 1930, the Gulf has lost 1,500 square miles of salt marshes, 40 percent of which has disappeared since 1984. Other habitat, such as mangrove swamps and sea grass beds, have lost vast amounts of ground to pollution and development, though no one is quite sure how much because no one knows how much was there to begin with.

• More than 90 percent of living coral in the Florida Keys has been wiped out. The mere 7 percent left is on America's only barrier reef and clustered in a few places. It is under siege from pollutants whose source is as close as the nearest boat and as far away as the farms in the Ohio Valley that send fertilizer runoff down the Mississippi River. Nearly 40 percent of the coral loss has happened since 1996.

• A 16-mile stretch of beach in Texas exemplifies the Gulf's problem with marine debris. During a four-year study, almost 400,000 pieces of trash were removed from the beach on Padre Island National Seashore. The island is called "the catcher's mitt" of the Gulf because of the way currents carry trash there.

• According to Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, red tide hit Florida's west coast in 58 of 152 years between 1844 and 1996. Between 1970 and 1999, red tide was reported every year.

The ninth largest of the world's 21 major waters, the Gulf is less understood than even its smaller siblings such as the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea and much less well-known than bigger bodies of water such as the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Evidence of this neglect shows up in the funding, or lack of it, the Gulf receives.

The EPA's Gulf of Mexico Program, a monitoring office patterned after the Chesapeake Bay Program and the Great Lakes Program, gets less money than either of those two, though the Gulf is richer in minerals and sea life than either, and the $20 billion it collects from tourism each year leaves the other two in the dust.

Not too late

What science has learned in recent years is that the Gulf is something of a desert at its center with water spiraling off a loop current that moves north through the Yucatan Channel.

Those spirals draw nutrients from the sea floor in open water, moving ecosystems that support all manner of life from plankton to whales to sea birds.

Beyond its beaches, diving and fishing, the gulf offers deep-sea wonders that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2002 Sustainable Seas Expedition recently explored.

The expedition found communities of animals deep in the Gulf that live in utter darkness a half mile down and that survive in a food chain based on methane rather than sunlight.

Though it is something of a desert in places, there is much left to save from further harm. The Gulf is far from barren.

The expedition found black corals unaccustomed to light and wire corals that coil from the sea floor in narrow strands, combing the water for food.

It found grouper holes generations old that dot the gulf plains, also providing habitat for other fish.

And there are tilefish that build mounds that other fish use for protection from predators in the open water.

More than a decade after the first President Bush declared 1992 the Year of the Gulf of Mexico, efforts to save the sea from becoming America's sewer are failing from government cutbacks, lax enforcement and inadequate policies for environmental protection.

"It's one of the most important water bodies in the United States," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, a grassroots clearinghouse for local environmental groups battling to save the Gulf.

"It's more of America's sea than any other sea, and it's in trouble. It's not in serious trouble because of any one issue. It's in trouble from the death of a thousand cuts."