Little Organisms, Big Problems
The blue-green organisms that cause the slicks on the local coastal ponds like Lake Agawam, Mill Pond, and Georgica Pond, to name a few of the worst blighted, are among the oldest organisms known to man. They arose more than three billion years ago, and if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be here, as they produced the first oxygen. They did it by photosynthesizing carbon dioxide and water. They were after making sugar, then starch; oxygen was a mere byproduct, but they used it to metabolize the sugar for energy and for building protoplasm.
The ones today are not exactly the same as the first ones, but some come quite close. As man, who was one of the latest comers, began to study the world around him, what did he study first? Why himself, of course. What did he study last, or if not last, almost last? These first cells without nuclei, these blue-green ones. Superficially they resembled algae, which are mostly green and which also produce sugars and starches from water and carbon dioxide, but algae have nuclei, cell walls, and chloroplasts containing chlorophyll.
It is only recently that they have been properly assigned to the bacteria kingdom. Thus the name “blue-green algae” is now defunct. These widespread primitive organisms are more properly called cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria occur just about everywhere, not only in water, but in lichens on rocks. You may have a few on the rim of your birdbath. They are not capable of moving independently as animals are, but they get around by various means — wafted in the atmosphere, carried on the feet of ducks and other water birds, attached to the fir of aquatic mammals and the shells of turtles, drifting from one part of a water body to another, and so on. They show up in residential aquariums regularly and can become a real problem.
Perhaps the best known of them are those in the genus Spirillum, named for their twisty forms. I say best known, because these cyanobacteria are favorites of those of us who tend to be homeopaths and vitamin freaks. Google Spirillum or visit your nearest health foods store and you will see several different forms of it packaged in vials with the seals of several different companies.
These biomeds crafted from farmed Spirillum are said to do the following: provide energy, depress appetites, aid the immune system, and clear body fluids and tissues of arsenic and other poisons, as well as serve as antioxidants that can prevent DNA and cell damage that can ultimately result in cancers. As described in the health food literature and its advertisements, they are almost miraculous in their ability to provide longstanding well-being and vigor.
But Spirillum can be a double-edged sword. Throughout the world it has been implicated in the poisoning of livestock and pets, which drink from ponds and other water bodies (even rain puddles) in which it thrives.
In ponds on grazing lands there are more than enough fertilizers in the form of urine and fecal depositions to provide the nourishment for “blooms” of Spirillum. If you buy it in a health food store it is most likely safe, but if you lap it up from the surface of a polluted water body, watch out! Remember the dog that drank from Georgica Pond a few years back and died soon after.
There is some recent evidence linking cyanobacteria, including Spirillum, to human diseases, those that affect the liver, brain, and neuromotor tissues. A few scientists have even pegged cyanobacteria as a cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and other degenerative nerve and muscle diseases. Waters with surface blooms of cyanobacteria should be avoided at all costs, thus the numerous health advisories emanating from county and state health departments in this decade warning people not to swim or wade in such waters or eat fish and shellfish caught in them.
People who live in the vicinity of ponds with longstanding blooms — such as those occurring in Lake Agawam, Mill Pond, and Georgica Pond — should take care, as the air above the blooms may contain cyanobacteria cells or parts of cells that can be inhaled. Over a long period of time, say a summer, the inhalation of such cells can add up.
Take Georgica Pond, for example. It was once much larger, stretching far out into what is now ocean. Georgica Pond’s shorefront has been retreating at more than a foot a year for the last 300 or 400 years and coastal geologists say that the rate of retreat will increase during the rest of this century as sea level rises. It is not common knowledge that the freshwater in the near-shore aquifer, which is less dense than seawater, is buoyed up by rising seawater levels. Therefore, look for Georgica Pond levels to rise commensurately during the coming decades.
It is interesting to note an observation of the late Jim McCaffrey, who lived on the pond for most of his life and who was the pond’s untitled caretaker, knowing it as well as he did and being an East Hampton Town trustee for much of that time. He noticed that when the pond was let out, the water level in other nearby ponds, especially the one in the sandpit just to the pond’s northern boundary on the north side of Montauk Highway, also dropped. A long time ago, Georgica Pond and Hook Pond to the west in East Hampton Village were in the same watershed, one that reached north beyond the airport and half way up Three Mile Harbor Road to the north of the village.
A spill of gasoline or some other chemical at the airport, or the salt to melt the snow on Three Mile Harbor Road will eventually work its way toward those two ponds at a foot or more a day at the top of the underground water table. Ample road runoff from Montauk Highway already enters these two ponds every time it rains. If it doesn’t run directly overland into Georgica Pond, as it does in the case of Hook Pond, it reaches it via the southerly directed flow of the underlying water table.
What many don’t know is that a significant part of Southampton Town contributes its groundwater to Georgica Pond, including the fields and woods west of Town Line Road, as well as the Poxabogue golf course. In the early part of the new millennium, I took subsurface water samples from the extreme southwest bottom of the pond and the nitrate nitrogen levels were more than 10 parts per million, which is above the New York State drinking water standard. I attributed it to nitrate fertilizers coming off those fields to the west.
We also have septic wastes and runoff from residences situated on the edge of the two ponds and upgradient of them. The golf course half surrounding Hook Pond is another large contributor. Fortunately, the phragmites, or common reed, surrounding much of the pond, which no one likes, sops up a lot of nitrates, phosphates, and other chemicals that would otherwise run into the pond.
Not ironically, perhaps, the airport occupies almost a third of Georgica Pond’s watershed, and most of that land is in Long Island’s aquifer protection district, which is different from the town’s watershed overlay district created a few years earlier. The two districts were so designated more than 40 years after airport clearing began. Ironically, the Town of East Hampton exempts itself from following the rules and regulations governing these two districts, thus a new landscaping company was able to clear 10 acres of prime oak and pine woodland bordering Industrial and Town Line Roads for its private business use near the end of last year.
Hook Pond has not been the same since the early 1930s when it began permanently draining to the ocean through an overflow pipe. And Georgica Pond will never again be the pond that Jim McCaffrey came to know intimately during the last half of the last century, when alewives routinely ran up to its northern border to spawn. It is now plagued with all of the evils of the 21st century and needs to be opened more than two times a year to purge them.