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Scientists Solve Riddle of Toxic Algae Blooms
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the Victoria Times Colonist: "After a remarkable 37-year experiment, University of Alberta scientist David Schindler and his colleagues have finally nailed down the chemical triggers for a problem that plagues thousands of freshwater and coastal ecosystems around the world." Punchline: "Phosphorus."
This week's lesson: this discovery comes not long after phosphorus was eliminated from most household laundry detergents by federal law.
According to a chemistry major I know, adding one gram or so of phosphorus can cause more devastating algae ownage than adding two or three kilograms of carbon.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
From TFA:
There are now 146 coastal regions in the world in which fish and bottom-feeding life forms have been entirely eliminated because of a lack of oxygen. One dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is about the size of the city of New Jersey and growing.
I can understand dumbing-down the units of measure to Volkswagens or Libraries of Congress, but the last time I looked at Wikipedia, New Jersey was still the 3rd state admitted to the Union. I mean, come on... it's already the brunt of every New York comedian's jokes, and now you Brits are trying to demote it to a mere "city"?
(Of course, I'm from Texas, where an "area the size of the STATE of New Jersey" would barely be counted as a moderate-sized ranch.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Not only does the government have to pull out all stops to control phosphorous, he says, it needs to protect wetlands that remove these nutrients from runoff before they reach lakes and streams. It also needs to set up rules that create natural buffer zones that protect lakes and rivers from agricultural, municipal and cottage developments.
Who knew that pumping phosphorous and toxic waste into the rivers and ocean would have negative consequences.
The Long Now Foundation
Isn't the fact that phosphorus stimulates algae growth, which suffocates other lifeforms, common knowledge? I seem to recall being taught this in school...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I was wondering what was so important about this study because the effects of phosphorous on aquatic life have been known for decades (hence the phosphate ban on detergents) but then I RTFA (which also mentioned the ban) and what the experiment really showed was that efforts to control nitrogen runoff are useless because it turns out nitrogen is not the problem (the implication being we are wasting money^Weffort controlling it).
Bottom line: nitrogen is not the problem, phosphorous is _still_ the problem and needs more effective pollution control measures.
More music, fewer hits
Harvest the stuff. Make fuel out of it. It's way better than using corn. You're throwing away free gas...ok diesel.
What?
New Jersey, Northumberland, New Brunswick, Canada This is an article from Canada after all.
I'm taking it as a very clever form of satire: confusing New Jersey as a state versus a city; confusing Canada with England.
I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's a Canadian article because it's in English and Canada is the only state in the Union that speaks English.
Is there something I'm missing here?
A shot at enough money to fund an experiment for 37 years, apparently.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Yea, jesus, that's a whole career with only one deliverable.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...is an essay by Isaac Asimov, first published in the April 1959 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, then latter in his collections Fact and Fancy (1962) and Asimov on Chemistry (1974).
In it the Gentle Doctor argued that phosphorous has the greatest relative concentration increase going from its abundance in the natural environment to that in life of all sorts. It thus was often the limit to growth of life as it was scavenged up and held in the biomass.
It's always important to confirm by testing in specific cases, as with this one, as there are other limits, such as dissolved iron. I can't remember where, but I recently read that low blood iron may be a defensive mechanism to make it hard for bacteria to grow during some infections--and that treating the low iron may be the wrong treatment here.
The worst part of the algae blooms are the damn mindworms.
Also, I'm not sure what phosphorus has to do with it; I thought algae blooms were caused by drilling too many thermal boreholes.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Ahem. I happen to know Dave Schindler--he and my father were colleagues--and his contribution to our knowledge of aquatic ecosystems has been quite important. Among other seminal research out of ELA were definitive papers on phosphorus and nitrogen loading (per TFA) and a little thing called acid rain. Not long ago Schindler was given a $1M award for lifetime contributions to science, and I'm not aware of anyone who would say it wasn't richly deserved.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
It took 37 years to figure out that fertilizer helps plants grow?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
...fish waist...
Fish don't have waists. That's why they seldom wear pants.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Is/does fertilizer always contain phosphorus?"
It does if you order it that way. The three numbers on fertilizer bags are:
Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potash(Potassium).
If the middle number is zero it doesn't have any Phosphorous. You can get a number of trace elements like Sulfur, Calcium, Magenesium, Iron and other assorted trace elements.
Properly educated farmers, gardner and landscapers certainly can reduce the problem by:
A. Getting their soil tested before they apply fertilizer and apply only what is indicated by the test. Using a lab is best if you are fertilizer some acreage, or you can make an educated guess using a home test kit.
B. Be careful when irrigating after applying fertilizer to avoid washing it off, sprinklers being much preferred over flood irrigation
Another factor that is probably reducing the Phosphorous pollution problem is its so expensive lately, along with Nitrogen and Potash, that farmers either can't afford it or are very careful when they do splurge on it.
@de_machina
. . . so I took her to New Jersey. ;-)
Algae growth can literally FILL a lake in just a few years, in fact this is part of the natural cycle for small lakes, which as they silt up and the water warms up, will fill first to algae beds, then to marsh, and finally to meadow; once started, the entire process can take as little as ten years
Rich snots find pleasant lake and build waterfront mansions around it. Being rich, they insist upon maintaining a couple of acres of putting green quality lawn around them. [This I know, since I live on such a lake, but my 'yard' is basically wild. Whatever grows there unfertilized naturally. The rich snots hate me for not having a nice green lawn.] Eventually, their fertilizer will plug up the lake, turning it into a marsh. Their property values will plummet and they'll all move out.
Have gnu, will travel.
Algae is not innocent. Did you know that most spam is generated by algae colonies hacking into open wireless routers? Or that algae monsters invaded Las Vegas and now own all of the casinos? That President Bush is, in fact, algae?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
the type of algae involved with most toxic blooms in freshwater systems (and is the cause of many marine and estruary blooms as well) is mostly cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, which is certainly not a plant.
Phosphorous from fertilizer is the really big problem from farm run-off as a lot of the rest of the run-off elements/chemicals are naturally at higher concentrations in the water to begin than is the case with P. Normally there is almost no dissolved P left floating around free in an aquatic system. P is scavenged like crazy in aquatic systems is one of the main factors limiting overall biomass of the system.
Really this article is a nice PR piece but we still don't know what causes harmless blooms to turn toxic. Harmless blooms aren't bad really, they just are inconvenient to us humans. They feed higher lifeforms and up the chain to the fish we eat (now overfish and we end up with food chain issues which cause blooms to stick around longer). The toxic blooms are the problem and we aren't really closer to finding what triggers their toxin production. We still just know what causes algal growth in the first place. Which we've had a firm grasp on for a long time now (thanks to this same research center)
Is there something I'm missing here?
Read your own link, then your post. You mention phosphorus and only phosphorus. Your link mentions phosphorus and nitrogen. That's what the issue is. The common thought was that it was all fertalizer (expecially phosphorus) that caused the blooms. He showed it was phosphorus and only phosphorus and that attempts to remove nitrogen as well only exacerbated the problem. It isn't anything "new" in that phosphorus causes blooms. It is "new" in that people thought other chemicals contributed as well, and they have been found to be inconsequential.
Learn to love Alaska
Harvesting is one of the principle limitations to the commercial adoption of algal biodiesel.
-
Check out some of the results of a Google for "reef+phosphates" and see the problems even a tiny increase in the ppm of phophate can cause in a salt-water reef aquarium. Even just one additional ppm above "normal" can be pretty extreme.
Multiply those effects by the size of our collective phosphate-largesse and the size of the oceans and I guess you get full-on dead zones instead of just a tank of nasty algae and bacteria.
Hope this helps.
-Matt
I was thinking the exact same thing. As a saltwater reef aquarist I've been testing phosphates every few days for years to keep algae (esp. that annoying bubble algae) in check. I don't ever recall reading anything that considered nitrogen (other than nitrogenous waste ... which is another issue) to be part of the algeal bloom cycle. As mentioned earlier up in the thread, amateurs aquarists have a ton of products for phosphate removal/sequestering ... are these not practical on a large scale?