Eradication of Lyngbya Should Include Starving Algae

Eradication Of Lyngbya Should Include Starving Algae

By Helen Spivey
Co-Chair, Save the Manatee Club Board of Directors

Opinion-Editorial
Date: April 21, 2013

Fighting the filamentous lyngbya algae has been on my radar since the early 1980s, when the city of Crystal River’s sewerage plant spewed almost daily doses from the plant was getting flooded through leaky sewer pipes from the bay and sloshing its treated and untreated effluent back into the bay on outgoing tides.

I used to carry a gallon jar of the stuff and sit it on the desk in front of me, as an elected member at city council meetings. I remember the fascination of my fellow council members with my jar. They couldn’t take their eyes off of it, but never mentioned it or how it was produced.

5K Run

In 2005, water in the St. Johns River took on a sickly, green tint during that summer and fall as algae fed on the abundance of nutrients in the water. (Photo courtesy St. John's River Water Management District)

Many years later, the city was finally ordered to stop the sewage effluent discharge into the bay waters and go to an inland spray field. Alas, it was too late. But under the axiom of “quit while you are ahead,” I didn’t run again. You see, by this time King’s Bay was littered with the only plant that survived the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of chemical herbicides poured on it by the county. Lyngbya lived!

One project in particular, called One Rake at a Time, has been initiated to do something immediately to remove lyngbya in specific areas. It is marvelous to have hundreds of people carefully raking the foul, filamentous algae up, getting people to see firsthand what’s in and on the waters. They get out there where they can see what happens as lyngbya gets fed from lawn fertilizers, road runoff, storm water runoff and a myriad of other nutrient sources we carelessly use in the springshed area.

Hopefully people realize that what they are doing by raking is not a cure, but it is a way to see what it can look like when effective restoration comes along, and help. A cure will starve the filamentous algae, causing it to release its stranglehold on the submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) struggling to grow on the Bay bottom.

Recently, stories have emerged have people fearing the filamentous lyngbya will poison manatees and they will die as they have on the southwest coast of Florida, where red tide is killing hundreds of manatees, or, as they have in the Indian River Lagoon on the east coast where, another form of algae, is thought to be linked to nearly 100 more manatee deaths. But what’s over there in the Indian River Lagoon is not a filamentous algae like lyngbya; it’s a phytoplankton. When a system is out of balance, these very small algae can bloom like red tide and cause massive losses of seagrass like they did in the Indian River and those blooms often lead to massive fish kills, as well.

These types of algae are already in King’s Bay and just need to be pushed past the tipping point by stirring up large amounts of the nutrient-rich sediments from all over the bay’s bottoms by something harsher than a rake or manatees sauntering along the bottom on their flippers. We need to be careful we don’t tip the scale. A major phytoplankton bloom is something you never want to cause or see on King’s Bay.

While these results of lyngbya removal can be seen right away, great care must be taken to avoid doing additional harm, especially since until we remove the sources of lyngbya food, it will just come right back.

There are folks working to come up with long-term natural solutions. I belong to King’s Bay Adaptive Management (KBAM) that just finished a year’s scientific study of a section of the bay, establishing a baseline of where the waters are at so we can verify improvement from our next step.

We are going to that second step now, working with plants that will rapidly consume the nutrients currently feeding lyngbya and the phytoplankton. Where we can scientifically measure the results for a glimmer of success — proof it will work by using natural ways to reverse what has happened to King’s Bay.

And as you know — all projects need volunteers — so keep watching the Citrus County Chronicle for notices as to what, where and when you can help too.