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Page 2 Friday, September 18, 2009 Longboat Key News News Worthy NewsWorthy from page 1 billion natural-gas pipeline is proposed to be 28 miles southwest of Tampa Bay and the north end of Anna Maria Island. Town Manager Bruce St. Denis said that a memorandum of understanding between Port Dolphin and the State of Florida reveals that the town must utilize the sand in two of its permitted sand sites by June 2012. St. Denis assures that this will happen in the allotted time frame. If the town is not able to remove the sand by June 2012, Port Dolphin has agreed to extend the town’s deadline to June 2013, or reimburse the town for sand lost in those sites. The agreement makes the condi- tion that the town will be reimbursed for the cost of sand removal to a limit of $5 million, and, the town will also be reimbursed for the cost of permitting up to $500,000. The town’s next scheduled beach renourishment was slated to be 2013. Phillip Younger qualifies for at-large seat. Resident Phillip Younger has officially qualified as a candidate for the at-large commission seat in the election to be held in March 2010. The at-large seat is currently held by Commissioner Hal Lenobel. Lenobel has not yet confirmed if he will run for office next term, but has picked up paperwork at Town Hall for his second two-year term. Lenobel has served on the commission in the past, serving three consecutive two-year terms and acting as mayor. He took a time period away from the commission and is now in his second year of a first term. Younger serves as a code enforcement board member and is also on the board of directors for the Longboat Key Public Interest Committee. Others who have qualified for candidacy are District 5 Vice Mayor Robert Siekmann and District 3 Commissioner Peter O’Connor. The District 5 and District 3 seats have not yet been contested for the March election. Mayor Lee Rothenberg’s District 1 seat is currently wide open, as Rothenberg is term limiting out. Mote robot recovered A robot that was AWOL last week from its red tide patrol in Southwest Florida resurfaced at 6:06 a.m. Thursday and once again began signaling its position to Mote scientists. Mote staff didn’t waste a minute before hopping in a boat and recovering the robot, called an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV for short. “We’re thrilled to have Waldo back,” said Dr. Gary Kirkpatrick, inventor of the payload the AUV carried to detect red tide. “It’s our only AUV currently patrolling for red tide, and it’s crucial for studying algae blooms.” Waldo, the AUV nicknamed for the popular cartoon character from the “Where’s Waldo” series, was found about 50 feet from the last place it was tracked, about 11 miles west of Venice. The robot was listing slightly to one side, but the researchers have yet to discover why it lost touch with satellites. “We think it’s possible that it was snagged on something underwater,” Kirkpatrick said.“But we’ll need to check the data it was collecting to see if that helps shed some light on what hap- pened.” The robot had been patrolling Southwest Florida waters since Aug. 26 carrying a BreveBusterTM, a device designed by Kirkpatrick and built at Mote to automatically detect red tide in the water column. Waldo was supposed to report its position to Mote scientists via satellite each time it surfaced - about every two hours. But as it glided along on Aug. 31 near Venice, it stopped sending signals. Mote scientists searched for the 115- pound, canary-yellow robot for more than 10 days using side-scan sonar, VHF, hydrophones, airplane surveys, snorkel- ers and divers.When Waldo lived up to its nickname by proving extremely difficult to find, the scientists even put a call out to the public for help. Waldo — valued at $100,000, plus another $30,000 for its red tide detector — has been “on the job” for Mote since 2005, through a grant from Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). Mote scientists added two identical robots, Nemo and Carmen, in 2006 through a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But the latest project for these two robots has ended, and they currently have no funding to replace Waldo. While given a tongue-in-cheek nick- name, Waldo has a pretty serious job patrolling for Florida red tide, which can kill or sicken sea animals and birds and cause respiratory ailments in humans. The information the AUV transmits back to researchers in the lab is impor- tant to helping us unlock how red tides begin, where they travel and what even- tually causes a bloom’s demise. Since it’s too expensive to send researchers out on boats to patrol for red tide 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the job has been turned over to robots like Waldo. Using AUVs and BreveBusters has helped sci- entists show that phytoplankton — the group of microscopic organisms that the red tide belongs to — are very unevenly distributed in the waters off the coast of Southwest Florida. That makes Karenia brevis, the organism that causes Florida’s red tide, difficult to locate and even harder to forecast. 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