Fifteen years of collapse and comeback.

Read the full timeline.

The most complete, sourced chronology of the lagoon’s collapse and recovery lives on the timeline page — 15+ dated events from the 2011 super-bloom to the November 3, 2026 ballot, with major factual claims linked to primary or authoritative source material.

See the fifteen-year timeline →

More story pages coming.

Over the summer and fall of 2026, the Story section is expanding with:

• Before the fish kill — how the lagoon got so vulnerable in the first place. Citrus, coastal development, the seawall era, and the slow accumulation of muck and septic.
• The 2011 super-bloom — a lagoon-wide algal bloom that, combined with subsequent stress events, drove roughly a 43% loss of mapped seagrass between 2009 and 2011 mapping windows and set up the 2016 collapse.
• 2016: the year everything broke, and the year we did something about it — the fish kill and the tax vote, in the same eight months.
• The manatee mortality event (2020–2022) — NOAA's closed Atlantic Florida manatee UME record lists 1,392 animals from December 2020 through April 2022, with malnutrition secondary to ecological factors identified as the cause. What the record said, why it happened, and what changed after.
• The comeback (2023–2026) — mapped seagrass extent and selected water-quality indicators have improved in parts of the lagoon, while official assessments continue to describe recovery as incomplete and vulnerable to weather, runoff, algal blooms and other stressors.

If there is a piece of the story you want me to write about specifically, email hello@irlfacts.org.