Contact: Eliot Hurwitz FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11/12/96
A panel of scientific experts will gather in Sarasota, Fla., to study the impact of harmful algal blooms -- sometimes known as red tides -- that have persistently plagued Florida's Gulf coast and been implicated in manateee deaths, human illness from swimming, shellfish bed closures, declining recreational and commercial fishing opportunities, and a weakened tourism industry.
The workshop, to convene at the Mote Marine Laboratory on Nov. 13-14, is the third of three regional workshops sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Ocean Program and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Sponsors for the Sarasota gathering also include a a local citizens group called START (Solutions to Avoid Red Tide) and Florida's Marine Research Institute.
"The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and NOAA's Coastal Ocean Program deserve a lot of credit for inaugurating these first steps toward developing a national focus on harmful algal bloom management and mitigation," said Donald Anderson, a member of the panel and a leader in the development of a national scientific and management program to deal with blooms.
"This is the kind of effort at the federal level that has proven very effective in our attempts to implement a national research program on harmful algal blooms. In particular, COP has provided funding for this research for several years already, and is currently the lead agency in developing a major interagency research effort that focuses on a predictive understanding of blooms -- namely, their ecology and oceanography," Anderson said.
Every year these harmful algal blooms (HABs) cost the United States millions of dollars from losses in affected industries such as real estate, tourism, and commercial and recreational fishing. The NOAA-NFWF effort is aimed at gathering information in a scientific manner and creating an awareness of the critical need for everyone to work together to find sound solutions to the problem. The panel of experts will hear presentations from local scientists, coastal resource managers, and members of the public whose interests are affected by HABs.
Blooms are caused by the rapid proliferation of minute algal cells. In the case of red tides, the pigment in the organisms makes the water appear reddish. Other blooms appear as brown tides, while some have no discernible color. Some blooms can be toxic to human beings and living marine resources.
Both the frequency and duration of HABs have increased in the United States over the past 20 years. However, no clear causative link has thus far been established between the occurrence of HABs and human activities, although connections with "non-point source" runoff pollution are evident in other parts of the world.
The expert panel is meeting in an effort to assess national HAB problems by intensively evaluating them in regions frequently affected, and then recommending management and mitigation strategies. The Sarasota workshop is the last one in the NOAA-NFWF series. The two previous ones were held in Port Aransas, Texas, which has suffered from "brown tide" and "red tide" outbreaks, and Seattle, Wash., where domoic acid (amnesiac shellfish poisoning) outbreaks are a particular concern.
The panel is chaired by Donald Boesch, a coastal ecologist from the University of Maryland, and includes researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Long Island University, University of Washington, University of Texas (Austin), and NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service Beaufort (N.C.) Laboratory.