Beachside Solutions and Wildlife

When you’re in the area, there are numerous signs and warnings about the wildlife in our proximity that you might miss if you aren’t looking for it. We have a lot of protected areas on the beaches for certain birds and other wildlife.  They have that for a reason. Please never take anything that is alive out of the ocean unless you intend to eat it.  We all love our fishing here, and we either eat it or catch-and-release if it’s not in regulation or out of season.  There are guides that you can look up on the Florida fish and wildlife website that describe almost all of the sea life here and what’s legal and illegal for harvesting or consumption. They even have an app on iTunes and Google Play for it.  

Occasionally it can be dangerous. They fly purple flags on the beach when there are dangerous things in the water.  Usually, it’s jellyfish or the occasional bull-shark, but that’s not nearly as prevalent as people think.  We will routinely pull up stingrays when fishing for Pompano and, when we can, we use that as a teaching opportunity for those unfamiliar with the wildlife in the area.  We let bystanders see them, occasionally touch them, before releasing them back into the water.   

One of the biggest problems that we see is people feeding the seagulls from their balconies, or on the beach. Please do not do that.  It might provide some small thrill for a minute or two but it attracts them to the resorts. Along those lines, if you’re out on a boat, we plead with you, please do not feed the dolphins.  It teaches them to approach boats . . . and their motors. Almost all of the dolphins that you see have scars on their backs and often, it is from the propellers of boats because people were trying to feed them some small fish or something.  Nobody wants to be the person who taught a dolphin to get hurt.  

We at Beachside Solutions have a partnership with one of the eco-friendly dolphin tour companies here that genuinely protect the environment and educationally take people out to see the dolphins in their natural habitat. You can even swim with them without harassing them, and we very highly encourage that because the staff collectively have an amazingly extensive knowledge of the water and what’s in it.