TWENTY MILES OFF THE LOUISIANA COAST - KRT NEWSFEATURES

(KRT) - From a research boat, the "dead zone" looks and smells and tosses like any ocean. You just don't see many folks fishing.

It was mid-September. As oxygen probes dropped to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, researcher Nancy Rabalais sat in the ship watching a bright orange line creep down a computer screen.

The line appeared normal at the water's surface: 6.3 parts dissolved oxygen per million. Deeper, however, it veered madly - a flat left toward zero, like a heart monitor in reverse.

"Zero point six," Rabalais said when the probes hit bottom. That meant the sea beneath her was suffocating. Nothing alive stirred in the deep.

The dead zone this summer reached 8,500 square miles, about as big as Massachusetts, to become the largest mass of oxygen-starved water ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Shrimp die. Fish flee. Crab carcasses lie covered in a bacterial mat as if spray-painted white.

In pockets where oxygen is totally depleted, the surface may appear clear, if a bit too glassy, while bottom waters faintly smell of rotten eggs.

"Call it the Berlin Wall of the gulf," said former Louisiana shrimper Donald Lirette, "because life can't cross it from either side."

A summertime phenomenon, the low-oxygen zone shrinks in the fall. Fishers in the Delta count on autumn storms such as Hurricane Lili to mix up the waters and restore some of the marine life upon which thousands of incomes here rely.

Now it is October. And farmers 1,000 miles to the north harvest their own bounty of corn and soybeans.

There is a link, scientists say, between lush Midwestern farmland and the lifeless areas of the gulf.

Nitrogen from crop fertilizer is thought to be the dead zone's prime culprit.

"Fertilizer nitrogen is cheap," said Giles W. Randall, a soil scientist at the University of Minnesota. "You might put on a little more than necessary" to boost a crop. Unfortunately, that excess is what leaches through" all the way to the gulf.

Spring rains in the upper Corn Belt trigger the process: Nitrates wash through the soil, travel along drainage tiles to tributaries and eventually hitch rides down the Mississippi River.

After the river flushes it into the gulf, the nitrogen does its job all too well. It creates more algae blooms and other tiny organisms than gulf creatures can gobble, said Rabalais, of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

The algae ultimately die, decompose and sink along with billions of fecal pellets from gorging zooplankton. The decaying consumes oxygen necessary for fish and other animals to live.

That the northern gulf is hypoxic, or oxygen-poor, is beyond dispute. A debate persists, however, about the exact causes, consequences and solutions.

Mindful that excess nitrogen can reach the Mississippi from an array of sources - animal manure, golf courses, water-treatment plants, even pollutants on drops of rain - many Midwest growers feel unfairly singled out.

Some ask in frustration: Is shrimp more important than corn?

Others voluntarily have taken steps to ease fertilizer runoff, partly out of fear that one day the government might force them to cut back.

Especially if the dead zone keeps growing.

The people of Terrebonne County, La., say shrimping is a way of life. Seventy percent of U.S.-harvested shrimp and two-thirds of the harvested oysters come from the gulf.

On trawlers scattered along the bayous, big nets hang limply and "For Sale" signs hang in some of the windows. For many shrimpers, those nets have been too limp too often.

"Worst season we've seen in 17 years," said Mary Solat, moonlighting with her children in a Houma, La., parking lot to sell her husband's catch of brown shrimp. "We don't know what the problem is. We just know it's putting a bite on us."

Part of the problem is that U.S. shrimpers toil in the face of low prices for imported shrimp, economists say. Ecologists also worry about the effects of low-oxygen water from which shrimp and other bottom-dwellers are too slow to escape.

Rabalais has tracked the phenomenon annually since 1985. At the time, the affected area measured less than half its size this year.

Swelling or contracting each summer, the size of the dead zone largely depends on the amount of rainfall in the Mississippi River basin. The basin, after all, drains 41 percent of the continental United States.

When the basin is soggy, as during the 1993 floods, the river carries an especially potent load of nitrogen - both manmade and the natural stuff of washed-out plants and dirt.

It all swirls south toward Terrebonne County, out the mouths of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers and into the gulf.

"In the old days, before flood protection, the lower Mississippi would routinely spill over and dump those nutrients back into the earth," said Len Bahr of the Louisiana governor's Office of Coastal Affairs.

"Now the nitrates pretty much stay in the river. They're coming down fast and literally being jetted into the Gulf of Mexico," Bahr said.

In 1993 low-oxygen waters expanded more than 50 percent, curling west for hundreds of miles along the Louisiana coast, spreading south as far as 30 miles.

The hypoxic area stayed roughly that size for five summers, alarming scientists and forcing local fishers to travel farther for their catches.

The dead zone shriveled in 2000 but, inexplicably, it ballooned to record size in 2001. It grew even bigger this summer, breaching Texas waters.

"I've seen shrimpers unload their nets and nothing comes out except a few dead horseshoe crabs," said Lirette of the Terrebonne Fisherman's Organization.

"Dead horseshoe crabs!" he exclaimed. "They lived through prehistoric times, but they can't live through this."

Still, nobody has data to prove that the dead zone is hurting the area's fishing trade. Anglers and shrimpers simply move to other parts of the gulf.

On the hypoxic perimeter, in fact, "they can get in a pretty good haul - if they can find it," said Chris Smith of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Seven years ago, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund led a coalition of fishing and environmental groups in petitioning the federal government to take action.

President Bill Clinton later signed a bill creating a task force to study the issue. During Clinton's last month in office, his administration delivered to Congress ambitious goals outlined in the task force report.

It concluded that a long-term reversal of gulf hypoxia hinged on cutting nutrient loads in the Mississippi by 30 percent - preferably through voluntary measures and federal incentives.

Farm advocacy groups simmered at the suggestion that upstream growers were to blame.

Some accused Rabalais - hailed "Queen of the Dead Zone" last year by Science magazine - of hyping hypoxia in order to sustain her research.

Rabalais, 52, admits that "dead zone" may mislead. Through much of the area, sufficient oxygen closer to the surface allows fish and some crabs to swim.

The Fertilizer Institute and the American Farm Bureau Federation weighed in with their own points. It is simple to detect excess nitrogen in the waterways, they said, but nobody can prove if it is from farm fertilizer, manure, lawn fertilizer, urban sewage or naturally rich soil.

If it is from fertilizer, then why has the dead zone nearly tripled in size since the late 1980s while fertilizer use leveled off?

"There are millions of square miles of the oceans that are naturally hypoxic," said Illinois State Water Survey chief Derek Winstanley, who argues that the dead zone may have lurked in the gulf for centuries. "We need to be looking at other causes."

It is true that "nitrogen doesn't have a fingerprint," said John Dunn, an engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency's Kansas City regional office.

However, studies by the U.S. Geological Survey clearly show the bulk of the nitrogen flux that fuels gulf hypoxia flows through farm states north of the Missouri Bootheel, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi.

The two most nutrient-heavy states - Iowa and Illinois - together are thought to supply more than 35 percent of the nitrogen flux throughout the vast river basin.

Missouri is among four states that each contribute between 6 percent and 9 percent of the total nitrogen flow, said Donald Goolsby, a retired hydrologist of the Geological Survey. Kansas contributes less than 5 percent.

Goolsby said the levels are relatively low in the Missouri and Kansas rivers because of drier conditions and the kinds of crops grown in the plains from which those rivers flow.

All major indicators, he said, point to nitrogen fertilizer washing through corn and soybean fields.

"I'm sure overfertilized golf courses in some places would contribute, as would the fertilizer people put on urban lawns," Goolsby said. "It all contributes ...

"But if you look at the real hot spots for this nitrogen discharge, they're not high-population areas. They're not places with huge wastewater plants or industrial emissions. It's cropland."

Homeowners who fertilize their lawns often use twice the nitrogen concentration that farmers apply. Golf courses might use five times the concentration, as much as 900 pounds per acre, Dunn said.

However, Minnesota soil specialist Randall said nitrogen is far better retained in the dense root systems of backyard turf than it is in cornfield rows. (Just don't spill fertilizer on your sidewalks, he advised.)

As for fairways and putting greens, researchers raise questions of simple square footage. As Jeff Bollig of the Lawrence-based Golf Course Superintendents Association of America notes: "The combined land mass of all the golf courses in the U.S. amounts to only half the size of Connecticut," smaller even than the dead zone.

Estimates of the Geological Survey and other research groups break down sources of nitrogen flux in the Mississippi basin this way:

_Most of it - perhaps 60 percent - comes from fertilizer, plant debris and minerals from soil fodder.

_About 15 percent is linked to animal manure.

_Between 10 percent and 19 percent of the flux is traceable to "point sources" such as municipal treatment plants and large slaughter operations, which can be easily monitored by regulators.

_"Other," including urban runoff and atmospheric nitrous oxide, contributes the rest.

Some experts point to the Black Sea as further evidence that heavy fertilizing breeds dead zones.

A hypoxic area even bigger than the Gulf of Mexico's sickened the Black Sea for decades until the mid-1990s. The return of oxygen there followed the Soviet Union's collapse: Farmers lost their state-issued fertilizer.

Still plowing at 73, Don Fischer of Corder, Mo., took a short break recently from harvesting 655 acres of corn and beans.

"Farmers get blamed for everything," said Fischer, who has farmed Lafayette County through a half-century of good seasons and bad. "We may be causing some of the problems, but we're not causing all the problems."

Yet he represents one of the solutions.

After hearing enough complaints about nitrogen runoff, Fischer, the past president of the Missouri Corn Growers Association, voluntarily cut his fertilizer back to 130 pounds per acre.

"It used to be maybe 200 pounds if I was looking for that big yield," he said.

Fischer learned he could still reap a decent crop and save $17 per acre on fertilizer costs, he said. But an even bigger incentive was his belief that if farmers did not take their own steps to cut nitrogen levels, the government might make them.

"Farmers are willing to try to solve problems if they can do it on their own," he said.

Bob Ball agreed.

"Their biggest concern is over some agency regulating their way of life," said Ball, a conservationist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. "We don't try to persuade them that they're causing problems in the gulf. But if we point out that fertilizer leaving their fields isn't doing anybody any good, they understand that."

Experts note that strict rules on fertilizer use are not likely at this time. So policy makers are promoting voluntary programs, including incentives for restoring wetlands that could absorb excess nutrients before they reach the gulf.

Congress is expected to pump about $700 million next year into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. It provides 75 percent of the costs to farmers implementing earth-friendly measures, such as planting strips of trees and grasses to buffer streams from crops.

Hypoxia forums - including one scheduled this month in St. Louis - are bringing together farmers, fishers and gulf ecologists to seek solutions short of the federal mandates so feared by farm lobbies.

"We want to bring those different worlds together and look at the Mississippi River as one system," said Doug Daigle of the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, an ecological coalition. "Farmers and fishermen are learning they actually have a lot in common."

But nobody expects the dead zone, or the debate, to just go away.

"This isn't a shrimpers-versus-farmers issue. It's an environmentalists-versus-farmers issue," said Jerald Horst, associate professor of fisheries at Louisiana State University. "The farm lobby is strong and the fisheries lobby is incredibly weak. But the environmental lobby - whew - they're Hoss!"

In the gulf last month aboard the research vessel Pelican, Louisiana State University doctoral student Zoraida Quinones poured into little jars water samples that would suffocate a minnow.

The threat swirling in those jars is something most Americans cannot see from their front doors nor, for now, feel in their wallets, Quinones said.

"This is everyone's responsibility," she said. "Hypoxia definitely is not healthy, it's not natural. ...It's a serious problem getting worse."

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