Florida's Wetland War

Part 3 of 4: Katahdin Sheep and Wetland Management in Florida

Fighting an Army With a Water Gun.

Let me tell you about Florida's invasion problem.

Over 500 non-native species have established themselves here. Five hundred. That's not a typo. It's more than any other state in the nation—more than most places on Earth. We're not talking about harmless lettuce varieties or ornamental flowers that stay where you plant them. We're talking about aggressive, ecosystem-destroying invaders that cost the state over $100 million annually just for plant management alone.

And that's just what we're spending. The actual damage? Incalculable.

This is Part 3 of our series exploring whether Katahdin sheep could play a role in Florida wetland management. We've met the sheep. We've examined the science of wetland grazing. Now we need to talk about the problem itself—Florida's 11 million acres of wetlands under siege.

Because before we can ask whether sheep are part of the solution, we need to understand exactly what we're up against.

The Paradise That Became a Battlefield

Florida's tropical climate is a blessing and a curse.

Endless summers. Year-round growing seasons. Abundant water. Lush landscapes that never stop producing. It's why people flock here. It's why agriculture thrives. It's also why invasive species throw the party of the century the moment they arrive.

Think about it from an invasive plant's perspective. You're Old World climbing fern, native to Africa, Asia, and Australia. Someone brings you to Florida—maybe in a plant shipment, maybe hitchhiking on equipment, maybe as an ornamental that seemed like a good idea at the time. You look around at this subtropical wonderland. No natural predators. No diseases that evolved alongside you for millions of years. Perfect temperatures. Abundant moisture.

You've just won the ecological lottery.

And you're about to wreak absolute havoc.

The Dirty Dozen (and Their 488 Friends)

The Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area maintains something called "The Everglades Dirty Dozen"—an annually updated list of the region's most destructive invaders. It's like a wanted poster for ecosystems.

But here's what keeps me up at night: that's just twelve species. The South Florida Water Management District has identified 66 species of non-native plants as priorities for control. Sixty-six species they're actively fighting. And those are just the plants they've prioritized—the ones causing immediate, documented harm.

Let's meet some of the worst offenders.

Old World Climbing Fern: The Smotherer

Lygodium microphyllum doesn't play fair. This vine grows fronds up to 125 feet long—125 feet—suffocating everything beneath them. It climbs trees, covers shrubs, blankets ground vegetation in thick, light-blocking mats. Native plants can't photosynthesize. Animals lose habitat. Everything underneath slowly dies.

And when it dies, it doesn't disappear. Those thick mats of dead plant material? Perfect tinder. They increase wildfire risk dramatically, turning what might have been a natural, low-intensity fire into an inferno that destroys the very trees the fern used to climb.

The fern is now widespread across south and central Florida. Not "spreading"—widespread. Past the point of eradication. Management now focuses on suppression through biocontrols and herbicides. We're not trying to eliminate it anymore. We're just trying to keep it from completely taking over.

Melaleuca: The Australian Mistake

In the 1960s, someone had a brilliant idea: import Australian melaleuca trees to help drain the Everglades. They wanted to convert wetlands to agriculture. The trees were too good at their job.

Melaleuca became one of Florida's most aggressive invaders, spreading rapidly across conservation lands, forming dense monocultures that displaced native vegetation and altered hydrology. A single tree can produce millions of seeds annually. It's drought-tolerant, fire-resistant, and ruthlessly efficient at colonizing disturbed areas.

The state mounted an all-out assault. The melaleuca management program became a national model for coordinated invasive species control. It involved multiple agencies, millions of dollars, biological control insects, herbicides, mechanical removal—everything in the arsenal.

The result? After decades of work, melaleuca is now under "maintenance control" in Water Conservation Areas 2 and 3 and Lake Okeechobee. Not eliminated. Not eradicated. Controlled enough that it's not actively spreading everywhere.

That's what "success" looks like in the invasive species world. Constant, expensive vigilance maintaining a temporary stalemate.

The Water Plants Nobody Talks About

Hydrilla. Water hyacinth. Torpedograss.

These aquatic invaders don't make headlines like Burmese pythons, but they're devastating in their own right. Hydrilla creates dense canopies at the water surface, blocking sunlight to everything below. It impedes navigation, destroys fish habitat, and degrades water quality. Water hyacinth—introduced in the 1880s into the St. Johns River—spreads so quickly it once made steamboat navigation nearly impossible.

The South Florida Water Management District operates the country's largest aquatic plant management program. During a single year, they treated over 185,000 acres of priority exotic plants. One hundred eighty-five thousand acres. That's bigger than New York City. In one year. Just to keep up with growth rates.

And torpedograss? It was actually intentionally introduced as a forage crop. Planted in almost every southern Florida county by 1950. Seemed like a great idea—drought-tolerant grass for cattle. Except it spreads through rhizomes and fragmentation, grows three feet tall, and now infests scrub, coastal flatwoods, marshes, wet prairies, lake shores, and disturbed sites throughout the region.

We literally planted one of our worst invasive species on purpose.

West Indian Marsh Grass: The Silent Takeover

Remember that 14-year Florida wetland study from Part 2? The one that showed grazed wetlands maintaining diversity while fenced wetlands lost it?

West Indian marsh grass—Hymenachne amplexicaulis—is part of why. It's categorized as invasive in Florida, and in ungrazed wetlands, it increases aggressively, forming vast monocultures. It's tall-growing, fast-spreading, and competitive enough to dominate entire wetland areas when grazing pressure is removed.

Chemical control is expensive and must be repeated. The researchers noted that "studies should investigate the costs and benefits of using cattle grazing as a way to control this particular species versus chemical application."

In other words: maybe letting animals eat it is smarter than constantly spraying it.

The Arsenal We're Fighting With

So how do we fight back? Florida throws everything it has at the invasion.

Chemical control: Herbicides targeted at specific plant species. Expensive. Requires repeated application. Environmental concerns about runoff and non-target effects. And the plants are developing resistance.

Mechanical removal: Cutting, mowing, harvesting. Labor-intensive. Often requires specialized equipment. Only addresses above-ground growth—roots and rhizomes remain. Plants regrow. Repeat forever.

Biological control: Introducing natural enemies—insects, pathogens—from the invader's native range. Promising for some species. Two melaleuca-feeding insects have been successfully established. An Australian moth attacks Old World climbing fern. But biological control takes years of careful research, testing, and monitoring. Each potential biocontrol agent must be exhaustively studied to ensure it won't harm native species.

Prescribed fire: Useful in some systems. Can kill invasive plants while promoting native species adapted to fire. But timing is critical. Wrong conditions create disasters. And some invasives are fire-adapted, making them harder to control with burning.

Early Detection and Rapid Response (EDRR): The gold standard approach. Find new invasions immediately, eradicate them before they establish. Sounds great in theory. In practice? Most invasions go unnoticed by the public and land managers until they're widespread. By the time we notice, eradication is often impossible.

Here's the brutal truth: we're playing defense in a war we're slowly losing. The invasion curve—a tool used to understand invasion status—shows that once species become established and widespread, eradication becomes impossible. We shift from prevention to containment. From containment to long-term management. From "get rid of it" to "keep it from getting worse."

The costs escalate. The effectiveness declines. The treadmill never stops.

The Scale Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

Want to know what really keeps wetland managers awake at night? It's not that we don't have tools. It's that we don't have enough tools for the scale of the problem.

Florida has 11 million acres of wetlands. Invasive plants impact approximately 1.5 million acres. Even with the largest invasive plant management program in the United States, the state can't keep pace with growth rates. We're treating 185,000 acres annually against 1.5 million acres of infestation.

Do that math. At current treatment rates, assuming nothing spreads further (a laughable assumption), it would take over eight years just to treat every infested acre once. And most invasives require multiple treatments. Annual treatments. Perpetual treatments.

The budget numbers are staggering. Conservative estimates put plant management costs at $100 million annually. Animal management could easily exceed that. These aren't one-time restoration costs. This is the annual price just to maintain the status quo—to prevent things from getting dramatically worse.

And the kicker? We're still losing ground. New invaders establish faster than we can control existing ones. Species that were minor problems ten years ago are now major threats. Plants we've been controlling for decades suddenly develop herbicide resistance.

It's exhausting. Expensive. And increasingly, land managers are asking whether there's a better way.

The Regulatory Maze That Slows Everything Down

Even when land managers identify solutions, implementing them isn't simple. Florida's wetlands are protected under multiple overlapping regulatory frameworks—federal, state, and local. That protection is vital. We've lost half our historical wetlands in the past century. What remains is precious.

But the regulatory complexity creates challenges for innovative management.

Want to try a new approach? You might need permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, water management districts, and local agencies. Each has different criteria, different timelines, different concerns. The process can take months or years.

This isn't bureaucratic incompetence. It's caution born from decades of wetland destruction. Regulators need to ensure that well-intentioned management doesn't cause worse damage. But the result is that even promising approaches face significant hurdles before implementation.

And here's where it gets tricky for something like livestock grazing: wetlands are often seen as areas that should be protected from disturbance, not managed through disturbance. Despite the research showing benefits of strategic grazing, the conceptual framework is still catching up. Convincing regulators that introducing livestock is actually a restoration tool, not a threat, requires solid research, pilot studies, and documented success.

Which brings us full circle. We don't have research on Katahdin sheep in Florida wetlands because nobody's done it yet. Nobody's done it yet because it's difficult to get permission without research. We're stuck in a catch-22.

What's Missing from the Toolbox

Let me be clear about something: the people managing Florida's wetlands are smart, dedicated professionals doing heroic work with limited resources. They're not missing obvious solutions because they're incompetent. They're stretched thin fighting fires—sometimes literally—across millions of acres with budgets that don't match the scale of the problem.

But there are gaps. Approaches that work elsewhere but haven't been tried here. Tools that could complement existing methods but remain unexplored.

We know cattle grazing can benefit certain Florida wetland types. That research exists. But most cattle operations aren't designed around strategic wetland management. They're designed around beef production. The grazing happens to benefit wetlands, but it's not optimized for that purpose.

We know sheep have different grazing habits than cattle—more selective, closer to the ground, willing to eat plants cattle avoid. We know this matters for vegetation management. But we don't have studies on sheep in Florida wetlands specifically.

We know Katahdin sheep thrive in Florida's environment, resist parasites that devastate other breeds, require minimal intervention, and are already being raised successfully across the state. But they're primarily in upland pastures producing meat, not managing wetlands.

We know from European and UK research that sheep grazing can maintain wetland diversity and benefit conservation goals. But those are different sheep breeds, different wetland types, different climates.

All these pieces exist. They just haven't been connected yet.

The Question We Keep Dancing Around

I've spent months researching this series, talking with farmers, reading ecological studies, examining regulatory frameworks. I keep coming back to one thought:

What if the solution to Florida's wetland invasion problem is already here, grazing peacefully in upland pastures across the state?

What if Katahdin sheep—already proven in Florida agriculture, already adapted to the climate, already demonstrating parasite resistance and low-maintenance characteristics—could be strategically deployed in seasonal wetlands during dry periods to control invasive plants?

What if the same characteristics that make them successful meat producers make them perfect for targeted vegetation management?

What if we're missing an opportunity because nobody's actually tried putting the pieces together?

Part 4 is going to explore exactly that question. We'll synthesize everything we've learned—the breed characteristics, the grazing science, the management challenges—into a serious examination of whether Katahdin sheep could fill a gap in Florida's wetland management toolbox.

We'll look at what pilot projects might look like. What questions need answering. What risks need managing. What partnerships would be required.

And we'll be honest about the uncertainties. Because this isn't about claiming sheep are a silver bullet solution. It's about asking whether an underutilized tool deserves serious investigation.

Florida is spending $100 million annually on plant management alone. We're treating 185,000 acres while 1.5 million remain infested. We're using every tool in the arsenal, and it's not enough.

Maybe it's time to consider whether we've been overlooking something simple. Something that's been right here all along.

Something with four legs and an appetite for exactly the plants we're trying to control.

Sources and Research

• South Florida Water Management District: Vegetation and Exotic Control programs

• Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission: Invasive Plant Management

• The Nature Conservancy Florida: Invasive Species Management

• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: Aquatic Invasive Species Control in Florida

• University of Florida/IFAS: "The Invasion Curve: A Tool for Understanding Invasive Species Management"

• Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area (CISMA)

• Boughton, E.H., et al. (2021): Long-term wetland grazing studies in Florida

Final chapter: Part 4 – "A Frontier Worth Exploring: Could Katahdin Sheep Fill the Gap?"