Huge Toxic Algae Bloom in Pacific Ocean Could Be Largest Ever

Posted on June 20, 2015

There is a very large toxic algae bloom in the Pacific ocean. It runs along a large portion of the West Coast from Central California to British Columbia. The bloom has already caused many West Coast fisheries to close.

An algae called Pseudo-nitzschia is part of the bloom. It produces a potent neurotoxin called domoic acid. The photograph above and a video (located here) show a California sea lion experiencing seizures thought to be caused by domoic acid poisoning. The NOAA video was shot last month. A monitoring program led by UC Santa Cruz first discovered concentrations of the toxin in early May and by the end of the month they had detected some of the highest concentrations of the toxin ever observed in Monterey Bay.

Domoic acid is not the only toxin associated with the bloom. The Seattle Times reports that a rare combination of toxins is turning up in shellfish in the Puget Sound and along the Washington Coast.

Vera Trainer, manager of the Marine Microbes and Toxins Programs at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, tells the Seattle Times, "The fact that we're seeing multiple toxins at the same time, we're seeing high levels of domoic acid, and we're seeing a coastwide bloom - those are indications that this is unprecedented."

Scientists say the green tide seen in Qingdao, China during the Olympics was a larger algae bloom than this one but it didn't produce any toxins. Raphael Kudela, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz, told CBS News, "It's definitely the largest bloom of this particular algae seen on the West Coast, possibly anywhere, ever."

The large bloom could be linked to a big patch of warm water that was first observed in the Pacific in June 2014. However, scientists will need more data to determine if the warm blob is contributing to the huge toxic algae bloom.

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