This is potentially the start of the decay of the oceans which is going to be the start of
the decay of mankind. It needs to be taken seriously. There has to be a way of letting the world realize that this could be the beginning of the end. It’s just giving us warning signs.
Anthony Roland grew up surfing on South Australia’s Flurio Peninsula. In March, what started as a normal day out with a couple of mates ended up with them walking back to the car park coughing.
I was taking my wets suit off and I started looking around and you know there was quite a busy car park and I noticed like these guys were coughing. They were coughing. Everyone was coughing here and there and I was like “All right something’s really not right here.” …
What those surfers were experiencing was the start of an unfolding environmental disaster along South Australia’s coast. They were breathing in algae particles that would soon create foaming tides and then wave after wave of dead fish. …
An ecological disaster has been unfolding on Australia’s coast 6:46 Min by ABC News, May 24, 2025
As parts of the country struggle through weather extremes, a similar ecological disaster is hitting southern oceans.
A marine heat wave with sea temperatures two to three degrees hotter than normal has been hitting South Australia’s coastline since September last year.
@climatecasino.net May 24, 2025:
Reminder, algae blooms are one of the top 40 impacts of climate change.
@egbertg.bsky.social:
Fun fact: some of them produce the same poison as the pufferfish … Only significantly more of it.
@davidjoyad1.bsky.social:
Yes, and most of the mainstream reporting is prompted by the loss of earnings of marine / tourism based businesses.
Perhaps they will gradually come to realise that money is merely a social construct, and one that has led us to destroy what really matters, the planet.
@roco8.bsky.social:
Account from my researcher friend on behaviour changes in normally placid Eagle rays…
Treasure Cove: a personal tragedy.
“As some of you know, I helped establish a small, private marine sanctuary on the Southern Yorke Peninsula. A couple of days ago my colleagues and I went down there to see what, if any, impact there had been from the micro algal bloom currently occurring in the lower parts of Gulf St Vincent.
To our dismay, Treasure Cove and all the areas around it have been devastated. Thousands of dead cuttle shells line the beaches, together with numerous fish, particularly leather jackets, toad fish, cow fish, and porcupine fish. Hardest hit of all were elasmobranchs (sharks and rays), particularly fiddler rays.
About half a dozen fiddler ray bodies were in the shallows and there were eagle rays swimming around in the cove. We put on our snorkel gear to check out the underwater scene and were almost immediately attacked by an eagle ray. One seriously injured my dive buddy who had to be flown to Adelaide for surgery, and another one’s tail barb missed me by centimetres. It seems that these normally docile and shy fish had somehow become demented by the algal bloom.
Treasure Cove will recover in time but the impact of this bloom is a stark reminder of the damage climate change is doing to both our terrestrial and marine environments. And its only going to get worse…
What a link between blue-green algae and degenerative diseases means for Floridians by Julia Cooper, WLRN Public Media, February 25, 2025, WQCS
A “toxic puzzle” is what first led ethnobotanist Dr. Paul Alan Cox to Guam, where the researcher spoke with the indigenous Chamorro people of two different villages about a paralytic disease that was affecting about a quarter of adults.
What Cox and others found was that a neurotoxin, called β-Methylamino-L-alanine or BMAA, had accumulated in Chamorron food sources, likely causing the disease symptoms.
“ Our thought was that this was sort of like Rosetta Stone,” Cox said. “If we could figure out what was going on in these villages, we might get deeper insights into how these diseases are related elsewhere.”
BMAA is produced by cyanobacteria — also commonly referred to as blue-green algae — and can be found in freshwater, estuaries and marine waters in Florida and across the globe.
A couple decades after the initial findings on Guam, a collection of researchers around the world are finding a strong link between environmental exposure to BMAA in cyanobacteria and degenerative nerve diseases like ALS, and possibly Alzheimer’s.
“ What we’re really interested in is first of all demonstrating there’s a strong link between environmental degradation and loss of human health,” Cox said.
The group, Brain Chemistry Labs, is a consortium of 50 scientists across 12 countries from various disciplines including neurology, microbiology, ecology, and more. Together, they’re connecting the dots between this neurotoxin in our environment and deadly diseases. They’ve studied BMAA and other algal toxins appearing in Florida waters, including during a particularly incessant Red Tide event in 2018 in Western Florida.
“ We think that preventing exposure to some degree will prevent some of the neurodegenerative illnesses that we’ve been studying,” Cox said.
WLRN spoke to Dr. Paul Alan Cox on a recent trip to Palm Beach about the Brain Chemistry Labs Findings, and their implications for Floridians periodically exposed to toxic algal blooms. The conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.
WLRN: Can you briefly describe where you began with this work linking blue-green algae to degenerative diseases like ALS and Alzheimer’s?
COX: We were really puzzled by a curious paralytic disease on the island of Guam. In two villages, Humåtak and Merizo, on the south side of the island, 25% of the adults were dying of this weird disease.
Sometimes it looked like ALS. Some of the patients had symptoms like Parkinson’s. Others had dementia like Alzheimer’s. Some poor villagers had all three indications. [The National Institute of Health] had worked on this for 20 years. But what we brought to the table is — I’m actually not a medical doctor or a neurologist, I’m an ethnobotanist. So instead of sitting in a clinic with a white jacket and a stethoscope, we’re out in the village talking to people, and we gained some really unique insights.
So tell me exactly what the findings were in Guam?
People in their diet have a high amount of the neurotoxin BMAA. This is produced by cyanobacteria, sometimes known as blue-green algae, but that’s a misnomer because they’re really not algae. They’re a bacterium.
We found that in their diet of cycad flour and animals that eat cycad flour, they’re getting large doses of BMAA. We were pretty astonished by the levels we saw in autopsy tissues in the villagers who died of the disease.
What does BMAA, this neurotoxin, actually do when it enters our systems?
Well, it’s an amino acid. We have 20 amino acids that make up our normal proteins. This is not one of the 20. And it actually inserts itself for L-serine, an amino acid in neuroproteins— when it does that, it causes the neuroprotein to misfold and collapse.
What does that mean for Floridians that are periodically exposed to harmful algal blooms?
I saw on the television in 2016, what local people in Stewart, Florida called guacamole— [this] very viscous cyanobacteria fluent coming down the St. Lucie River. I jumped on a plane [and] came out. When I got here there were 11 dead manatees. We sampled and it was very high in this neurotoxin. The Corps of Engineers was also releasing water from Lake Okeechobee down the Caloosahatchee and it was there impacting all these people, clear up Port Charlotte almost down to Fort Myers and Naples. So, we wrote a paper on our findings, and the same thing happened in 2018. We were out again. This time, in Western Florida, there was a red tide that was occurring out to the ocean. And then this inland cyanobacterial bloom was hitting people. So, we’ve been working with many other partners, trying to encourage the Corps of Engineers to manage Lake Okeechobee, so these neurotoxic blooms do not get released down to the St. Lucie River and down the Caloosahatchee. And I’m really thrilled to hear that the Corps now is building this big reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee to release these waters into, so we’re hoping that nobody again will be exposed to these neurotoxins.
And is a study that perhaps tracks where populations of high levels of ALS are appearing something you’re looking at?
Our colleagues, Dr. Elijah Stommel and his team at the Department of Neurology at Dartmouth have mapped ALS residences in New England. They find if you live next to a lake or estuary that has a high amount of cyanobacterial blooms that your likelihood of getting ALS goes up 25 fold. We were delighted that an unassociated group of epidemiologists from Arizona State did a study of environmental toxins in ALS and they find that the relationship between BMAA and ALS is the best supported linkage. There may be many other toxins in our environment that trigger these diseases, but we know for sure that that is one path.
We do believe that if we can make sure that people are not exposed to cyanobacterial blooms, either through ingestion or fish, or breathing, that we can reduce at least some of the incidents of ALS and perhaps Alzheimer’s disease.
Algae bloom toxins are an emerging threat to human and animal health by Vancouver Island University, February 24, 2025
VIU researchers Dr. Chris Gill and Lucas Abruzzi are developing revolutionary measurement techniques using paper spray mass spectrometry to detect algae toxins.
In many freshwater bodies across Canada, climate change is causing more frequent blooms of cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, some of which can produce potentially deadly toxins harmful to human and animal health.
“As global warming has increased, the prevalence of these blooms has also increased, and they threaten access to safe drinking water supplies as well as recreational opportunities across Canada,” said Dr. Chris Gill, a VIU Chemistry Professor and Co-Director of Vancouver Island University’s (VIU’s) Applied Environmental Research Laboratories. “The risk to human health is significant: dogs and wildlife have died from the effects of water contaminated with these toxins.”
VIU researchers Gill and Lucas Abruzzi, one of his master’s students, are developing revolutionary techniques using paper spray mass spectrometry to measure these toxins in less time and at a lower cost than traditional measurements. They are collaborating with the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada’s Halifax lab on the project.
“The possibility of rapidly measuring cyanotoxins directly from water samples using paper spray could transform the way testing is done across Canada particularly in remote communities where it can be cost-prohibitive to ship large water samples away for testing,” said Dr. Daniel Beach, a research officer with the Biotoxin Metrology lab at NRC in Halifax.
Gill said cyanobacteria were some of the earliest organisms on the planet, and they can produce a range of toxins referred to as cyanotoxins. The researchers are testing for three different classes of cyanotoxins including microcystins, nodularin and anatoxins. Gill said current measurement methods for cyanotoxins are time-consuming and costly, so many jurisdictions rely on less reliable techniques such as cell counts and visual observation of blooms to protect public health. Without measuring toxins directly, closures could occur unnecessarily in waterbodies with safe levels of toxins. More importantly, unsafe toxin levels could be missed, leading to potential human or animal exposures.
On Vancouver Island, lakes such as Elk Lake, Thetis Lake and Prior Lake can have persistent cyanobacteria blooms and can be closed for months, said Gill, adding that just because you don’t see algae blooms doesn’t mean there aren’t any toxins present.
“Most of our drinking water is relatively unthreatened here in BC, but if you move inland to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, their drinking water often comes from shallow lakes. Shallow lakes are great places for algae to grow,” said Gill.
“You can’t necessarily tell if toxins are present just by looking at a lake. Sometimes the bloom isn’t on the surface. A lake could look clear and safe but there could still be toxins present,” said Abruzzi. “Different areas of a lake could also have varying levels of bloom, so the toxin isn’t always universally dispersed. The only way to compensate for this is through more frequent and widespread testing.”
With the paper spray mass spectrometry method the researchers have developed, a tiny volume of water sample (a fraction of a drop) is transferred to a strip of paper and introduced directly into the mass spectrometer for measurement. Results are obtained within two minutes without any sample preparation, as compared to up to 30 minutes per sample for conventional techniques, which also require extensive sample preparation.
“That’s why it’s revolutionary, there’s very little sample preparation,” said Gill. “The method also offers the potential of drying samples collected at remote sites on paper strips. Those dried strips can be shipped easily in the mail for analysis, whereas if you’re collecting a water sample, it must be transported on ice, making it expensive and cumbersome to send for analysis.”
VIU’s lab has been working on paper spray mass spectrometry methods since 2014 and developing methods to measure algal toxins for the past three years. Gill said part of the goal is to develop methods to miniaturize the technology so it can go where conventional methods can’t.
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