Toxin-producing green goo returns to plague Lake Erie

[Spiel]

Toxin-producing green goo returns to plague Lake Erie

 

 

September 8, 2009

Craig Pearson / Canwest News Service

 

 

A mysterious green gunk found in Lake Erie recently may indicate that an explosion of toxic algae is again threatening to suffocate the lake.

 

University of Windsor professor of biological sciences Jan Ciborowski believes the goo is cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, which feed on phosphorus and produce toxins.

 

"These toxins can kill animals and make people sick," said Ciborowski. "You don't want to drink it. And I wouldn't want to swim in it, either."

 

Ciborowski figures the cyanobacteria has bloomed en masse the last couple of weeks because of warm temperatures and low winds, as well as more nutrients in the water.

 

"It was one of the signs of the lake not being in good shape," Ciborowski said, referring to the '60s and '70s.

 

"In the 1960s, the Great Lakes were declared dead because there was so much phosphorus going into the lakes that we were getting these huge blooms of algae," Ciborowski said.

 

"The algae would eventually die, drop to the bottom, decompose, and use up all the oxygen in the lake."

 

So in 1972, the Canadian and American governments formed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, designed to limit phosphorus by banning it from detergent and mandating better sewage treatment. It worked. By the early 1990s, the Great Lakes seemed comparatively clean.

 

"That was the great success story of the Great Lakes," Ciborowski said. "Everybody thought that we had solved the problem. But since the late 1990s, even though we're not adding phosphate to detergent anymore, we're starting to see that there's more and more phosphorus getting back into the lake somehow. One of the big research questions now is where is that phosphorus coming from?"

 

Though phosphorus is found naturally in the environment, it is considered a pollutant when overly abundant. Its most common commercial use is in fertilizers and pesticides.

 

Scientists have been so confounded about 100 of them gathered in July in Windsor for the two-day Great Lakes Phosphorus Forum.

 

Cyanobacteria is the same sort of algae linked to as many as 75 deaths in Brazil, though no such deaths have been reported in North America.

 

Bruce Fox, owner of a marina tackle shop in the lakeside town of Colchester, says he has never seen such an algae bloom. "It looks like pea soup . . . You would almost think you could walk on it, it's so thick."

[Twocoda]

who would have thought Lake E would be the next producer of bio fuel