9/20/2023 0 Comments Blue planet nutrientsThe story of cyanobacteria on this planet goes back about 1.9 billion years, however. His first thought was Where’s this paint coming from? One day while riding his bike home from work, he came across an arresting site: Kotzebue Sound had turned chartreuse, a color unlike anything he thought existed in nature. Whiting’s cyanobacteria story started in 2008. “But it is something that we, I think, are just not quite prepared for right now.” Whiting and Subramaniam want to change that by figuring out why Kotzebue is playing host to cyanobacterial blooms and by creating a rapid-response system that could eventually warn locals if their health is at risk. “I try not to be alarmist,” says Thomas Farrugia, the coordinator of the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, which researches, monitors, and raises awareness of harmful algal blooms around the state. In the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea, cyanobacterial blooms contribute to deoxygenation of the deep water and harm the cod industry.Īs climate change reshapes the Arctic, nobody knows how-or if-cyanotoxins will affect Alaskan people and wildlife. Rotting cyanobacteria rob the waters of oxygen, suffocating fish and other marine life. When phytoplankton blooms decompose, whole ecosystems can take a hit. More often, people who are exposed experience fevers, headaches, or vomiting. People can also suffer: In an extreme case in 1996, 26 patients died after receiving treatment at a Brazilian hemodialysis center, and an investigation found cyanotoxins in the clinic’s water supply. In East Africa, for example, blooms in Lake Victoria are blamed for massive fish kills. Although many cyanobacteria can survive in the marine environment, freshwater blooms tend to garner more attention, and their effects can spread to brackish environments when streams and rivers carry them into the sea. Many communities have fallen foul of cyanobacteria. Read: What killed these bald eagles? After 25 years, we finally know. Some species can produce cyanotoxins that cause liver or neurological damage, and perhaps even cancer, in humans and other animals. But unlike many forms of algae, cyanobacteria can be dangerous. In the spring, for example, increased light and nutrient levels cause phytoplankton to bloom, creating a microbial soup that feeds fish and invertebrates. Huge colonies of algae are nothing new, and they’re often beneficial. We’re all there to collect a summer’s worth of information about cyanobacteria that might be poisoning the fish Schaeffer and many others depend on. On the bow, Ajit Subramaniam, a microbial oceanographer from Columbia University Whiting and Schaeffer’s son Vince have their noses tucked into upturned collars to shield against the cold rain. We’re motoring toward a water-monitoring device that’s been moored in Kotzebue Sound all summer. The two of us are crammed into the tiny cabin of Schaeffer’s fishing boat in the just-light hours of a drizzly September 2022 morning. “We’re ocean people,” Schaeffer tells me. Alaska Natives, who make up about three-quarters of Kotzebue’s population, pull hundreds of kilograms of food out of the sea every year. In the middle of town, the Alaska Commercial Company sells food that’s popular in the lower 48-including cereal, apples, and two-bite brownies-but the ocean is the real grocery store for many people in town. The only road out of town simply loops around the lagoon before heading back in. Planes, boats, and four-wheelers are the main modes of transportation. Before the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue had his name attached to the place in the 1800s, the region was called Qikiqtaġruk, meaning “place that is almost an island.” One side of the two-kilometer-long settlement is bordered by Kotzebue Sound, an offshoot of the Chukchi Sea, and the other by a smaller body of water that looks like a lagoon. Kotzebue sits about 40 kilometers above the Arctic Circle, on Alaska’s western coastline. He wonders if the die-off was a symptom of a problem he’s had his eye on for the past 15 years: blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, that have become more and more noticeable in the waters around this remote Alaska town. “We have no idea what caused it,” says Alex Whiting, the environmental-program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue. Fish were “literally all over the beaches,” says Bob Schaeffer, a fisherman and an elder from the Qikiqtaġruŋmiut tribe.ĭespite the dramatic deaths, there was no apparent culprit. The sheer magnitude of the October 2021 die-off, when thousands, possibly millions, of herring washed up, is what sticks in the minds of the residents of Kotzebue, Alaska. ĭead fish were everywhere, speckling the beach near town and extending onto the surrounding coastline. This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine.
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