Testing ways to fight Blue-green algae blooms

Since the 1980's green-blue algae blooms have been a problem in Florida and now there are two trials in Gainesville attempting to solve this problem.

Here's a peek at how both tactics are supposed to work.

The main way to try and stop algae blooms from forming is to eliminate their nutrients, usually phosphorous and nitrogen, which is extremely difficult.

Daniel Canfield Jr. is a UF professor who specializes in managing aquatic systems who helped explain why. "In the state of Florida, you can never reduce the nutrients low enough to make sure you never ever have an algae bloom again. Even some of our nutrient-poor waters in the state have algae blooms and the reason is geology. We have phosphorous and nitrogen in our soils."

However, mitigating the blooms is possible and one way being tested right now is using something called dino-soil.

Canfield explained, "the dino-soil is a coagulant that takes algae to the bottom and also binds to phosphorous and takes it to the bottom where in theory the algae is then used as food by benefitted organisms but the water is supposed to turn clear."

The other process involves pumping hundreds of gallons of algae thick water through machines to clean it.

TV20's Landon Harrar reported "so how the process works is the water coming out of the lake looks like this, you can see there's a lot of green in there. Well, they add a few chemicals called a coagulant which actually bundles up the algae in little balls as you see here, then that goes through the machine and microbubbles push the algae up to the top. After the algae goes all the way up to the top it is then skimmed off and the water underneath like this goes right back into the lake."

Canfield broke it down as "one process takes it to the bottom and is used in a more static system, the other is a more active system where they float the algae up and take it off."

The dino-soil test is being done in one of the most algae thick ponds in the area, and full results won't be available until Friday or Saturday. The pumping method has been on-going since Monday and will continue all week, the results for that process could take up to a month to get final numbers.