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Nature Notes: Blue-Green, but Not Algae

Tue, 09/17/2019 - 16:15
Cyanobacteria blooms can create a paint-like scum on the surface of the water, as seen in this 2014 photograph of Georgica Pond during a bloom.
Morgan McGivern

Just a month ago nine dogs died from drinking pond water in New York City’s Central Park that was thick with blue-green algae, oops, I mean cyanobacteria. Not actually algae at all, this group of primitive greenish-blue organisms with cells having no nuclei has been around for 3.5 billion years, makes oxygen from water the way true green plants do, fixes nitrogen, and may be the most widespread bacteria in the world. Yet most of us laypeople didn’t know anything about it until pet dogs started drinking the water in which it grew, then got very sick, and even died.

More than three years ago a pet dog died from drinking the water in Georgica Pond, a case of the same prognosis. It’s extremely virulent, yet we know little about it.

I learned about cyanobacteria, or cyanophyta, while I was a graduate student at San Francisco State University in 1961. Working on the production of brine shrimp, I found this blue-green filamentous organism, Anabaena, fouling the water to the degree that the brine shrimp stopped growing, and many died. I should have switched my master’s degree focus from brine shrimp to blue-green algae. Who knows, I might even have won a Nobel Prize in biology.

Blue-green algae, or cyanophyta, has suddenly become a household term as it is plaguing fresh and estuarine waters throughout the world. Here in the United States, it is found on both coasts and in the Great Lakes. At a recent family gathering my nephew Larry told me that he lived at the edge of a lake in New Jersey that was infamous for it. People were barred from swimming and fishing in the lake.

Closer to home, we find it in many of our local ponds, some to the degree that it shows up in aerial photographs of the South Fork as gray, not blue. I have been studying aerial color photographs since the 1980s when East Hampton Town ordered its first set covering the entire town. In retirement, I find myself studying Google’s satellite maps in the same way. If one looks at, say the coastal ponds between Water Mill and East Hampton Village on satellite maps — Mill Pond, Kellis Pond, Little Long Pond north of the Bridgehampton Commons, Poxabogue Pond, part of Sagg Pond, Georgica Pond, and Swan Pond, a tributary to Mecox Bay — this discoloration stands out like a sore thumb. Look at Agawam Pond and Old Town Pond in Southampton and you find the same degree of discoloration.

Long Pond and the other four largest ponds south of Sag Harbor and north of Poxabogue are clear blue and have thus far escaped the plague caused by cyanophyta species. In general, the closer to the ocean the pond, the more likely it is suffering from cyanophyta, to the degree that freshwaters throughout the Atlantic coastal states from Florida to Maine have been suffering.

Some would find it ironic that a fungal group that started 3.5 billion years ago, one that may have been responsible for the evolution of most of the species of flora and fauna we have in the world today, has come back to haunt us, maybe even ultimately wipe us out. Thank God it needs sunlight to replicate itself, so our drinking water that comes from below the land surface is thus free of it.

One scientist has even suggested blue-green algae may have a causal link  to Lou Gehrig’s disease. Blue-green algae blooms in ponds have been described as far back as the 12th century. Farmers have lost cattle to blue-green-algaed waters for more than 100 years. Dogs that drink the water are dying. Are we just seeing the first stage of a worldwide scourge, one that would make the Black Death, smallpox, and polio look small in comparison?

What we can’t do at this stage is let our guard down. Mean temperatures are rising. Scientists tell us that the blue-greens begin to thrive when the temperature exceeds 75 degrees Fahrenheit. But nutrients, the nitrogenous ones as well as phosphates, are also involved. We must continue to work diligently to see that the blue-green algae scourge is nipped in the bud. One of the worst things we can do is to continue to develop our freshwater shorelines and run wastewater into the very ponds themselves, from either above or below ground.

After all, the human species is one of the most recent in the history of evolution. We have been developing our various societies mostly by employing the trial and error method. We must do better, or we may just as quickly join the ranks of the woolly mammoth, sabre-toothed tiger, dodo, great auk, passenger pigeon, and other extinct species. We have saved the California condor, whooping crane, trumpeter swan, and several others that were on the verge of extinction, but can we save ourselves?


Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

 


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