State of the science: Experts continue to improve algae research in Lake Erie

TOLEDO - Up until very recently, much of western Lake Erie looked green the last few weeks as another severe harmful algal bloom coated the water.

This year, the bloom in Lake Erie was expected to come in at a 7.5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, severity index, which is based on a scale of 1 to 10, making it one of the most severe blooms in the past several decades.

That forecast, which NOAA issues annually in early July, is made possible due to the advancements made through research that scientists have been performing firsthand in Lake Erie over the past decade or so.

Even more recently, NOAA now also issues multiple bulletins available to anyone with email access each week during the harmful algal bloom season, which is primarily in July through August.

The algae biomass can be seen from space

They can find out exactly where the bloom is because it is so big that its huge biomass of algae can be seen from space.

Researchers use data taken from satellites flying over Lake Erie and cross-reference it with data on the direction and speed of Lake Erie’s water currents to forecast both where and how big the bloom will be just days out and share the forecasts with the public through frequent bulletins delivered immediately via email.

That is just one of many vital advancements made by researchers in efforts to reduce toxic harmful algal blooms, which can be both a risk to public health and local economies reliant on Lake Erie tourism.

The scientists themselves share these advancements in the research directly with public officials, stakeholders and other peers each year at the annual “Understanding Algal Blooms: State of the Science Conference,” which was held in Toledo on Thursday, organized by the Ohio Sea Grant College Program.

Algae blooms are harmful because of the toxin microcystin

For Justin Chaffin, research coordinator at the Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island, improvements have been made to forecast not just the size and location of the bloom, but the geographic concentration of toxicity within the bloom as well.

While nobody wants their lake to look like “pea soup,” researchers have found no correlations between just how green the water is and its level of toxicity.

So for the past two years, Chaffin’s research has been focused on why that is the case, aiming to learn the contributing factors to the toxicity levels within a bloom.

The blooms are toxic because of a toxin called microcystin, which is the byproduct of blue-green algae, another name for microcystis.

When microcystis cells die in waters with levels of nitrogen, algae cells release the microcystin toxin. While the size, scale and severity of the bloom is based on the load of phosphorus entering Lake Erie each spring, the degrees of the bloom’s toxicity concentration is based on nitrogen present in the water at the time those algae cells die.

The higher the nitrogen levels, the higher the concentration of toxicity within the bloom.

But to forecast when, where and to what degree those high levels of toxicity concentration will be relative to within the bloom’s given location, researchers need a lot of water samples from throughout western Lake Erie to analyze in the lab and work with the data to develop models that would do that forecasting accurately.

“Can we estimate toxic concentration in time and space?” Chaffin asked.

According to Chaffin, the question his recent research has been trying to find out is precisely what’s happening between two given data points, which come from those lake water samples.

“In order to answer that, we did an intensive survey this year and last year we called a ‘HABs Grab,’” he said.

During the “HABs Grab,” 175 samples were collected this year in the western basin by individuals from a total of 15 different institutions involved in the project.

And given the average cost of what it takes to operate a boat on Lake Erie in just gas alone, which can be as much as $150 per hour, this kind of research is not cheap. On top of that, there is also the cost of hours worked on those boats, in the lab and elsewhere.

Chaffin’s research project cost a million dollars for three years.

“It’s not cheap to do toxin analysis. Boat time’s not cheap either,” he said. “It’s not cheap, but it’s not astronomical.”

jstinchcom@gannett.com

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Twitter: @JonDBN