Mari Ness - Duckies!

So last night our class trooped in ready to learn more Fascinating Facts About Marine Viruses, this time from a kindly scientist who works at Miami-Dade County's Department of Environmental Resources Management. One might immediately assume that Miami-Dade, of all places, has little to tell anyone about how to manage environmental resources, although if you are looking on how to transform a lovely wetland and beach area filled with birds into a concrete jungle filled with cars, toxins and pollutants, this is undoubtedly the place to find out how to do this.

To be fair, Miami-Dade is taking some steps to at least control pollution problems, whatever certain skeptics (for example, evilstoryteller) may say, and our speaker discussed heading out to various sections of Miami-Dade County, most notably Hialeah and Opa-Locka, to find and clean up ongoing sources of small pollutants and toxins. Unlike, say, Detroit, Miami-Dade is noticably free of extremely large polluting companies (well, if you exempt the nuclear power plant at Turkey Point, which many people wouldn't) but noticiably jam packed with small businesses notorious for 1) working illegally 2) not particularly interested in following environmental lawas. We spent an awestruck hour looking at various pictures from various Miami-Dade businesses, until the conversation was suddenly interrupted by the word ducks.

Ducks.

Ducks, as it turned out, are evil. I had always thought they were, what with the odd looking beaks and so on, but now, I have proof: Miami-Dade's DERM says so, and if you can't trust somebody in Miami-Dade to identify evil, you can't trust anybody. It's not just that they quack, or that they have weird beaks, or flap their wings oddly, or that the vast majority of ducks in Florida are Muscovy ducks that are not native to Florida at all (and, by the way, this means, legally, that you can kill them if you want to. Really. The state of Florida is perfectly happy to have you kill an evil Muscovy duck. So, take your homicidal tendencies to the ducks) or that ducks tend to make a lot more ducks. No, it's because ducks, and I am trying to put this politely, are major, major sources of various very nasty bacteria that you really really don't want in your water because, well, they'll make you sick, and it will make your water smell. In fact, and he had far too many statistics to prove this, ducks are one of the greatest environmental threats in Miami-Dade County. *

If you people think that I get excited about things, you have not yet met this man, or his duck obsession, or his articles about ducks, or his excitement about ducks, or his rants about people who feed ducks. (He's not fond of geese, either.) It was electrifying, and opened our eyes to the true nature of evil: ducks.

Rubber duckies are fine. We asked. They attract bacteria and will eventually degrade and are frankly pretty odd -- his words, not mine -- but they aren't, strictly speaking, evil creatures that are one of Miami-Dade County's greatest threats.

I have to say that I'm now looking at my vibrating rubber ducky in an entirely new way.




* I should point out that these ducks are actually from South America and were initially intended to be raised for food, until they got loose and made more ducks. So this is not exactly a case of Miami-Dade declaring war on native local fauna. They do enough of that for other reasons.