Monitoring Begins on the Beaches of Lake Superior

Monitoring of Lake Superior beaches will begin after Memorial Day. The Minnesota Department of Health will be monitoring the water quality along the Lake Superior shoreline from Duluth to Grand Marais, which includes 39 public beaches.

Staff will be checking the water to detect the presence of E.coli bacteria or other harmful pathogens or contamination. The samples will be analyzed once a week from the beaches, while samples from the most heavily used beaches will be analyzed twice weekly.

The results will be posted immediately to the telephone hotline and beach website at www.MNBeaches.org.

Northland's News Center - www.northlandsnewscenter.com 

21 May 2012

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Harmful algal blooms can cause rash, illness

It's a green, blue, brown or black slime that tends to foam and sometimes gives off a foul smell. And it could make you sick.

It's blue-green algae, and it's been a growing problem on Lake Erie in recent years. Last year it spread to the largest-reaching plume on record, and weather conditions could make this year equally bad or worse, said Doug Kane, assistant professor of science and math at Defiance College.

The News-Messenger.com - www.thenews-messenger.com

02 Apr 2012

K Smith Horn

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Will plague of toxic algae accelerate a focus on Lake Erie?

Western Lake Erie is on fire -- metaphorically speaking.

At a recent University of Toledo College of Law workshop, speakers implored Michigan and Ohio residents to see the emerging parallels between western Lake Erie's record algae outbreaks in 2010 and 2011 and Cleveland's 1969 Cuyahoga River fire.

Their point: Sometimes it takes a major embarrassment to galvanize a region.

Public outrage over algae is finally getting through to the right people, but meaningful action has been a long time coming. The degree of commitment has yet to be seen, especially as the two states attempt to promote a more business-friendly atmosphere.

Western Lake Erie needs to become a stronger focal point for fertilizer runoff control, just as Cleveland was the focal point for better sewage treatment after the Cuyahoga caught fire. Cleveland lived with the embarrassment of being called the "mistake on the lake" for years.

Toledo Blade - www.toledoblade.com

03 Apr 2012

T Henry

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Algae growing under Lake Erie ice spur dead zones

Algae growing under Lake Erie ice spur dead zones

Clarkson University biologist Michael Twiss and other Great Lakes scientists have discovered there is a lot going on under the ice.

“When I was working up in Canada, I won a grant to use the coast guard vessel to study for a week,” Twiss said. “I wanted to use it as late in the season as possible, which was November. We found a lot of interesting stuff. “

Among the things he discovered is a high concentration of algae in Lake Erie during the winter. That’s unlike spring when there are almost no algae present.

Environment Canada and Canadian Coast Guard personnel recover a sediment trap from an icebreaker on an ice-covered Lake Erie in February 2010. Sediment traps are placed on the bottom of a lake to measure the how much algae sink to the bottom. In this case, algae are thriving in winter below ice. Photo by Michael Twiss, Clarkson University

And it is an important discovery because algae growth has been linked to the creation of Lake Erie dead zones devoid of oxygen.

...“The amount of algae in the winter shows that we have to study Lake Erie during the winter time in order to understand it in the summertime,” Twiss said. “It’s hard because there isn’t any data to compare it to and it takes a while to create a hypothesis. There is almost no data from the lake in the winter time.”

The information is especially important for efforts to shrink the dead zone.

Great Lakes Echo - greatlakesecho.org

24 Jan 2012

A Kasben

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Lake Ontario Algae Bloom News

More algal blooms in Ontario's lakes

... In a scientific paper entitled Algal blooms in Ontario, Canada: increases in reports since 1994, Dr. Jenny Winter and co-authors reported that public reporting of algal blooms in Ontario lakes has increased significantly from 1994 to 2009.

Further investigation by the team revealed that more than half of the reports in any year were for blooms of blue-green algae. This is a concern because some strains, of some species of blue-green algae, are potentially toxic.

...A rise in reports of algal blooms in Ontario is consistent with the observation that algal blooms are increasing in lakes throughout the world. Nutrient enrichment (in other words, increasing additions of phosphorus to lakes) is the leading cause globally, with blooms further exacerbated by climate change.
In Ontario, higher phosphorus concentrations are indeed part of the story. There are lakes near Sudbury, for example, where increased shoreline development and urbanization have contributed to higher phosphorus levels, and consequently, algal blooms.

However, in recent years, blue-green algal blooms have also been observed in lakes with low or declining phosphorus concentrations, suggesting that phosphorus is not the whole story.

Cottage Country Now - www.cottagecountrynow.ca

18 Jan 2012

A Paterson

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Cited Journal Article

Algal blooms in Ontario, Canada: Increases in reports since 1994 [free full-text pdf]

Lake and Reservoir Management. 2011; 27:105–112. doi:10.1080/07438141.2011.557765

JG White et al.

Lake Erie Algae Bloom News

Senator seeks EPA help with harmful algae in Lake Erie

Toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory 

Great Lakes biologist Jim Grazio wouldn't expect harmful algal blooms in Presque Isle Bay and nearby Lake Erie now. But that doesn't mean they couldn't be a problem here later.

"Things seem to be getting worse in the last decade or so," Grazio said. "HABs seem to be starting earlier, persisting longer and increasing in frequency."

These dense populations of algae, which contain toxins and can harm fish and humans, have especially been growing in the western basin of Lake Erie, around bays in Ohio, prompting a Pennsylvania senator to ask the Environmental Protection Agency for help. U.S. Sen. Bob Casey sent a letter to the EPA in December, encouraging the agency to work to improve the water quality in Lake Erie.

...An EPA regional administrator responded with a letter this month saying Jackson shares Casey's concerns. Susan Hedman wrote that in Jackson's capacity as chairwoman of the Great Lakes Inter-Agency Task Force, she recently identified "the reduction of algae blooms" as a Great Lakes Restoration Initiative priority.

Go Erie - www.goerie.com

21 Jan 2012

D Massing

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Lake Erie's algae outbreak taking toll on fish

Researchers who study Lake Erie think toxic algae blooms that have fouled the water in recent years will continue to cause drops in the number of walleye and perch in the lake.

That could deal a big economic blow to northern Ohio towns along Lake Erie that depend on tourists who come to catch the prized sport fish.

...The algae bloom this summer in Lake Erie, the shallowest and warmest of the lakes, was worse this summer than any time in recorded history, the report said.

Middletown Journal -www.middletown.com

13 Nov 2011

Location: Lake Erie, Ohio, USA

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News of Possible Botulism Outbreak in Great Lakes Region

What's killing the birds in Georgian Bay?

The beaches along scenic Georgian Bay are littered with thousands of dead birds – that Federal and provincial officials believe the cause of the death is a severe form of botulism, apparently from the birds eating dead fish.

To find out more about botulism, we spoke to Doug Campbell, a Pathologist with the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre at the University of Guelph, about how the disease grows, affects birds and fish, and whether human populations have anything to worry about.

Is botulism that is killing the birds and fish in Georgian Bay?

No it’s not confirmed at this time but it’s strongly suspected.


Why is botulism suspected in this case?

For a couple of reasons I guess. The first is that this botulism is a repeated event on the lower great lakes. At this time of year, since 1998, there is almost invariably been one or more botulism mortality events occurring. So the geographical location is new but the range of the species involved and the pattern of events, the timing of it, is fairly typical with what we’ve come to expect with botulism.

The other reason is that there is probably a shortage of other candidate explanations. I’ve had the opportunity to look at a few birds from this occurrence at Wasaga Beach over the last month because it has been sort of building a long period of time and so far we’ve not discovered any evidence of any other disease in these birds. With something like this we do try and make sure that we’re not missing something else rather than just assume it is botulism but the probability is that it will turn out to be Type E botulism.


So Georgian Bay is a new location? What could contribute to the botulism moving there?

We first saw type E botulism here in Canada in 1998. The disease had previously occurred on the American side of the great lakes as far back, that we know of at least, in the early 1960s. Why the disease comes and goes isn’t really known because it was quite an important disease on Lake Michigan and the American side of Lake Huron and even up into superior into the 1960s and then completely disappeared for twenty years. And then it reappeared in Lake Michigan in the 1980s and again after that, it disappeared.

As I said, we first saw it in south-eastern Lake Huron, down near the provincial park in 1998. Following that it moved eastward, south and eastward into Lake Erie and then eastward into Lake Ontario until it was seen down in the very eastern end of Lake Ontario. On Lake Huron, we really hadn’t seen much north of Kincardine until just a couple of years ago and over the last couple of years, we’ve seen some cases up and over the tip of the Bruce peninsula. So this occurrence in Wasaga beach area, I guess you could say is a natural, a logical eastward extension of where we have seen it before.

Source
Global Toronto
Photo courtesy of Global Toronto
24 Oct 2011
James Armstrong
Location: Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada

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Thousands of dead birds litter a stretch of Georgian Bay shoreline