![]() ![]() Fertilizer (for example, from home lawns and agricultural land).Levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen increase in water.This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Current.Many factors can help phytoplankton grow quickly, or bloom: “If they’re having this bloom event, they won’t end up having the same sort of oyster die off,” she said. The knowledge gained from the volunteers led Mintz to her summer sampling schedule and could be key to warning the public, or the oyster hatchery next door, if another bloom is on the way. It’s been an amazing experience,” Haeger said. But I’m forever grateful to both of them. “Why would they think that I could do something like this? I have no idea. And though she found out there are “at least 80,000 types of these critters,” she learned to identify the most common ones in the Skidaway River. I’m embarrassed to say this, I didn’t know how to use the microscope.” “They took us into the phytoplankton lab, gave us a microscope, gave us a prepared slide and said ‘Go for it,’” Haeger said. She remembers how at her first phytoplankton training the equipment flummoxed her. Her neighbors recruited the fitness instructor and former elementary teacher to the National Phytoplankton Monitoring Network team more than a decade ago. Sandy Haeger is one of Skidaway’s citizen scientists she also spoke at Mintz’s talk. They’re part of the UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant’s phytoplankton monitoring network, its longest-running citizen science program, now in its 20th year. Mintz’s work is piggybacking off about two decades of data recorded regularly by volunteers at about a half dozen stations along the Georgia coast, including a robust group at Skidaway. So does an influx of nutrients into a waterway, like fertilizer runoff from a farm or a sewage spill. Hot weather generally encourages blooms, meaning more are expected with global warming. She’s hoping to be able to understand what genes might be turned on during those particular scenarios that allow Akashiwo to scale up quickly. If one occurs, she’ll have data from before, during and after the event. Mintz, who is currently taking twice daily low tide samples of river water, is on the lookout for a bloom. And it can literally clog the gills of oysters,” Mintz said. ![]() “But they do produce that surfactant, that foam that I was talking about earlier, that can clump down bird feathers, and expose them to hypothermia. Some Akashiwo produce a toxin, though the particular ones in the Skidaway do not. Akashiwo - the term is Japanese for “red tide” - is a genus of algae that share the same garlic-clove shape. The working hypothesis is that a type of algae called Akashiwo were the culprits. “They did a water change per usual, came back the next day, and it was 80% to 90% mortality of those little oysters,” she said. One happened in the Skidaway River in 2019 and is believed to be the cause of a sudden death of a crop of baby oysters, called spat, raised at the oyster hatchery right next door to the aquarium where Mintz gave her talk. While Georgia’s high tidal range makes algal blooms less likely, they have occurred here, she noted. And that means that there’s high tidal flushing, so we’re getting a large influx of marine flood waters every day, (with) less nutrients.” Marys to Tybee.įirst the bad: “Generally Georgia isn’t necessarily monitoring it like Florida is, like South Carolina is, so we’re not seeing these blooms,” Mintz told an audience gathered to hear her speak at the UGA Aquarium on Skidaway Island last week.Īnd then the good: “So the Georgia Coast is a little bit special, right? We have those high tidal ranges. She says there’s a good reason and a bad reason why a map of harmful algal blooms shows little in the 100-mile stretch from St. Researcher Mallory Mintz is a University of Georgia Skidaway Institute graduate student who is studying the ups and downs of algae growing in the Skidaway River in Savannah. This overproduction of algae is not something that has popped up much on the Georgia coast, though. Green slime in Florida’s Lake Okeechobee and sickened sea lions on the California coast are two recent examples of harmful algal blooms making headlines. Credit: UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant ![]()
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