News & Announcements

• Newspaper cites septic tanks, fertilizer as causes for harmful algae bloom.
  
  
  
  Prorocentrum minimum algae
  In the Sunday, February 17th edition of the Mobile Press Register, reporter Ryan Dezember wrote an article "Weeks Bay sees harmful blooms," regarding the correlation between an algal population explosion and contaminated groundwater. The following are excerpts from the article.
  
  "FISH RIVER -- On a Tuesday in early January, a population explosion of Prorocentrum minimum, a single-celled plant stained Weeks Bay and the shallow canals at its upper reaches the unlikely color of reddish tea. Twenty-four hours later, the number of algae cells per liter grew to 2.4 billion, a concentration high enough to make beakers full of the water look like they were half-filled with mud. By the next day, the algae, Prorocentrum minimum, had undergone a mass die-off, but there were still millions of cells per liter, and the water remained discolored. "
  
  "Theories of the cause range from the dry year not providing the rain needed to flush the bay of the nutrients coming from the Fish and Magnolia rivers to work on a new U.S. 98 bridge, which may have loosened nutrient-rich sediment, Brunden and Phipps said. "
  
  "Karlodinium, besides turning the water the color of red wine, plagued the bay throughout the summer and at least five times caused fish kills."
  
  "A type of algae that is sort of a cross between a plant and an animal, Karlodinium produces a toxin that essentially bursts the blood cells in fish gills, said Hugh MacIntyre, a Dauphin Island Sea Lab scientist who specializes in algae."
  
  "Weeks Bay gets most of its water from the Fish and Magnolia rivers, both of which are spring-fed, drain agricultural land and are likely to be lined with homes using septic tanks. As such, there is ample opportunity for algae-feeding nutrients to make it into Weeks Bay, scientists say. "
  
  "Jim Connors Jr., a University of South Alabama professor who specializes in groundwater contamination, was called in to try to figure out where the nutrients were coming from that fueled the blooms. "
  
  "What he found, he said, was that direct runoff adds much of the nutrients to Weeks Bay. Nature has a way of dealing with the nitrate in groundwater, he said."
  
  "When nitrate -- a fusion of one atom of nitrogen and two of oxygen -- passes through swampy environments where dissolved oxygen is low, oxygen-starved bacteria dismantle the compound, releasing inert nitrogen gas. "