There’s something in the water off the coast of Santa Barbara County: It’s a horde billions strong, breeding in numbers not seen in years, producing a neurotoxin that can cause seizures, memory loss, and death.
It’s not oil. Beaches are reopening after the May pipeline rupture above Refugio State Beach; crude oil is sinking through the water column and out of view; and the Line 901 disaster is fading from the front page.
The culprit this time is a kind of algae: pseudo-nitzschia, a spindly little single-cell diatom that looks like a loose bead at the bottom of your grandmother’s jewelry box. Right now, there’s a bloom stretching from Alaska to the Santa Barbara Channel that’s bigger than anything like it’s seen in a decade.
Michael Milstein, spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), called the bloom “unprecedented.” He said it was “higher than anything we’ve seen before, very high concentrations.”
Pseudo-nitzschia makes a neurotoxin called domoic acid. Ingest enough of it, according to the California Department of Public Health, and you can get seizures and short-term memory loss. During a bloom, when warm oceans spur algae populations to explode, domoic acid builds up in oysters, mussels, and clams.
Scientists and government officials in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, and California test for domoic acid in those shellfish. In May of this year, as they do in the spring and early summer nearly every year, researchers detected elevated levels of the neurotoxin, which indicated an algal bloom.
A summer bloom is normal. The size of this year’s bloom isn’t. Raphael Kundela’s team at UC Santa Cruz tracked the bloom with boats and robotic gliders in Monterey Bay.
“It appears this will be one of the most toxic and spatially largest events we’ve had in at least a decade,” Kundela, a professor in the ocean sciences department, said in a press release on UCSC’s website. One thousand parts per million is cause for concern, and the samples from Monterey Bay, according to the team’s preliminary findings, were between 15 and 30 times as high as that.
It’s the biggest bloom researchers have seen since 1998—that’s the last time El Niño came around to warm up the Pacific. And, according to NOAA, this year’s bloom follows a 2014 with record-setting-hot temperatures for oceans.
But you can’t get domoic acid poisoning from swimming in the ocean, according to the Department of Public Health. It’s dangerous when it builds up in shellfish or small fish that eat the toxic algae and then get eaten themselves. Sea mammals that eat those poisoned shellfish can be poisoned as well.
Laura Sherr with the Marine Mammal Center in Morro Bay told the Sun that domoic poisoning in marine mammals causes “lethargy, disorientation, seizures, and in some cases death.” Her organization rescued 712 California sea lions in 2014. One-third of them had been exposed to the neurotoxin.
“That’s an 11 percent increase from 2013 and an 18 percent increase from 2012,” Sherr said.
Sherr’s organization has admitted more than 100 animals affected by domoic acid so far in 2015. Some were Guadalupe fur seals, an isolated species of about 10,000 animals, with San Miguel Island and the Santa Barbara Channel holding the only population left in the United States.
The Northwest Fisheries Science Center reports on its website that domoic acid poisoning is to blame for some human deaths and hundreds of cases of illness. Those numbers come from a single terrible night where three people died and upwards of 100 were injured on Prince Edward Island in 1987 in the wake of a tragic shellfish dinner. Several survivors had permanent short-term memory loss.
In 1991, seabirds with guts full of anchovies started to litter the surf of the Monterey Bay. Their symptoms were consistent with neurotoxin poisoning, NOAA reported on its website, and the anchovies in their guts were full of domoic acid. Fisheries closed up and down the West Coast, and stringent testing measures were put in place to check different kinds of clams, oysters, and mussels for accumulation of the acid.
Now, in the midst of the biggest boom anyone’s seen in years, the fisheries are closing again. In Monterey Bay, the Department of Fish and Wildlife has put a stop to shellfish harvesting. Some of Washington’s Dungeness crab fisheries, worth about $20 million a year, are also facing closures.
South of the Monterey Bay, the Department of Fish and Wildlife has yet to close any fisheries. Bernard Friedman, founder of Santa Barbara Mariculture, harvests oysters in the Santa Barbara Channel for a living. He told the Sun that he shifts production around in anticipation of summer blooms.
“Because the domoic acid has been prevalent over the last decade and a half or so, we’ve shifted things around. Most of my harvesting is done from late summer to early spring,” Friedman said.
He was hopeful that the bloom won’t last too long.
“I hope it goes away mid-July, “ he said. “My crop is due late July.”
Milstein with NOAA wouldn’t guess how long the bloom will last.
“That’s the million dollar question at the moment,” he said. “There’s some concern that it could hang on through the summer. A storm or high wind could pick up, that tends to mix up the water and disperse the algae. So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening. There’s some sense that it may be around for a while.”
The thing to do, said Milstein, is to watch and wait.
“We can’t get rid of the algae,” he said. “The best thing we can do at this point is to track it and know what areas are affected.”
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 2-9, 2015.
