#algae blooms

Hey, new Dan Egan? And I had to find out by myself, while wandering around the bookstore three months after it came out? Anyway, awesome book. For context if you’ve read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, it’s a bit shorter, but slightly more jargon-heavy/less accessible. This is also the perfect time of year to read it with unseasonably early blue-green algal blooms starting already. (On that note, pay attention to beach closures, especially if you’re there with your dog!)

The Devil’s Element is definitely the 10,000 foot view of phosphorus, and I do (unfortunately for my limited free time) want to read a lot more. Egan covers everything from its discovery, to its use in WWII, to the politics of ethanol, to current issues in Florida’s Lake Okeechobee and the surrounding area. There is also a very brief mention of corporations trying to refuse to change their irresponsible business practices on the basis that it would upset America’s housewives. There are a ton of citations and a bibliography in the back, so if you want to learn more, you’ll have a good place to start!

Excerpt from this story from the Chicago Tribune:

A bloom of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, appeared in Lake Superior about a decade ago, sending scientists in search of answers to why a worrisome problem was surfacing in a lake that holds a tenth of the earth’s surface freshwater.

The blooms, which have cropped up in all the Great Lakes, can deplete oxygen and cut off light, harming organisms trapped underneath. They sometimes create toxins that threaten the health of fish, dogs and humans, and make their way into water intakes. How and why toxins accompany some blooms is still a bit of a mystery.

With their ephemeral nature — the handful of blooms that have occurred in Lake Superior have been mostly small and short-lived — samples and good data are limited.

Since the first reported Lake Superior bloom in 2012, no serious levels of toxins had been confirmed.

That changed last month with a bloom near Superior, Wisconsin, that left a beach’s water streaky green. A toxin more potent than cyanide was detected just beyond the level set for safe swimming by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Lake Superior is among the world’s fastest-warming freshwater bodies and has increasingly borne the force of what used to be considered once-in-a-lifetime storms. Weather extremes fueled by human-caused climate change may imperil a lake whose reputation rests on its unspoiled water.

Algae blooms are generally driven by temperature, sunlight, water conditions and nutrients — primarily phosphorus, which can come from farm fertilizer and manure that eventually wash into lakes.

But among the Great Lakes, Lake Superior is an anomaly.

Unlike Lake Erie and Green Bay in Lake Michigan — warmer, shallower and surrounded by sources of agricultural runoff — Lake Superior is cold, deep and nutrient poor. Blooms have appeared in northern Canadian waters, but most span a popular recreational stretch from Duluth to the Apostle Islands, where land cover is largely forest and woody wetlands; agriculture and urban detritus are minimal.

Climate change appears to be a primary actor.

“The data have convinced me that the changing climate system has pushed Lake Superior into a new state, one where we get these blue-green blooms,” said Robert Sterner, the director of the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota Duluth. “One of the things that’s driving our work is if, in fact, we’re in the beginning of something that’s getting worse, we really owe it to the world to try to understand this circumstance as best we can.”

Due to toxic algae blooms, local health officials are now warning Portlanders to keep their pets out of the Willamette River from Ross Island to the Sauvie Island Bridge, a 14-mile stretch that includes the majority of the city’s waterfront.

Climate change what?

By Joel Achenbach, Kate Furby and Alex Horton, Washington Post, August 14, 2018

Florida’s governor this week made official what residents of southwest Florida already knew: The bloom of toxic algae that has darkened gulf waters is an emergency. The red tide has made breathing difficult for locals, scared away tourists, and strewn popular beaches with the stinking carcasses of fish, eels, porpoises, turtles, manatees and one 26-foot whale shark.

Gov. Rick Scott (R) late Monday declared a state of emergency in seven counties stretching from Tampa Bay south to the fringe of the Everglades. Scott promised $1.5 million in emergency funding.

The governor is facing Sen. Bill Nelson (D) this fall at the ballot box in a contest for the senate seat Nelson has held for three terms. Each man has accused the other of failing to tackle the red-tide calamity and the simultaneous bloom of a different type of algae that is clogging rivers and canals and putting a scum on top of Lake Okeechobee.

Citizens in retirement communities are reporting respiratory distress from the vapors of the microscopic red-tide organism called Karenia brevis. A recent study found a 50 percent spike in hospital visits due to respiratory problems during red-tide blooms.

The red tide has been gradually moving north, to the mouth of Tampa Bay, according to state tracking data. For many places, the daily reports continue to say “Water Color: Dark” and “Respiratory Irritation: Intense.” Worst of all are the reports that state “Dead Fish: Heavy.”

Rick Bartleson, a research scientist with the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, said water samples offshore show lethally high concentrations of algae.

“There’s no fish left. Red tide killed them all,” he said. “All of our concentrations of red tide are still high and would still kill fish if they were out there.”

The algae is found in marine environments for most of the year, but the past two months have produced high concentrations, said Kelly Richmond, a spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The duration of blooms can be affected by sunlight, nutrient and salinity content, she said.

The toxins can aerosolize in the wind that drifts ashore, triggering respiratory problems or worsening conditions such as asthma. That has incited many tourists and some locals to flee.

“I can’t even let my cats out on the lanai,” said Amy Ernst, a Sarasota printmaker who lives near the beach. “Eyes burning, throat burning, sinus problems.”

Adrienne Miceli-Trask, 52, a salon owner who helped organized the Hands Along the Water protest in Sarasota, said: “It’s not just on the beach. It’s in our intracoastal waterway. It’s in the air. It’s toxic. Somebody’s backyard on the intracoastal is totally filled with dead fish. It’s disgusting.”

Scientists are trying to figure out why, exactly, the current red tide along the Gulf Coast has been so protracted and deadly. State officials and scientists point out that, at base, this is a natural phenomenon. Fish die-offs were noted by Spanish explorers in the 1500s and have been well documented since the 1840s.

But the incidences of red tides seem to have increased since the 1950s and 1960s. Climate change could be a factor; warmer waters, up to a certain point, are congenial to algal growth. The Gulf of Mexico’s surface temperature has warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit since 1977.

There’s a more direct human handprint on the current crisis: Florida’s landscape and the flow of water have been radically altered by agriculture, canals, ditches, dikes, levees and the sprawling housing developments that have sprouted as the state’s population has boomed. Bartleson said Lee County used to be 50 percent wetlands and is now about 10 percent wetlands.

In the old days, he said, rainwater slowly filtered into the aquifer or seeped into estuaries. Now it rushes rapidly, unfiltered, into rivers and bays and into the gulf, typically loaded with agricultural nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous, which feed the algae.

Researchers have experimented with ways of killing the toxic algae, but they are proceeding cautiously because they don’t know what effects it could have on the ecosystem.

“The ocean has thousands of species of algae, really only a little bit more than a hundred that produce toxins that are dangerous to us,” said Don Anderson, the director of the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms, based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Algae in general are hugely important to marine life.”