Fishing for algae toxin

BOWENS ISLAND— It looks like a lot of other high school science experiments. The James Island Charter High School students drop a scoop from the edge of the dock into Sol Legare Creek and bring back a water sample for the lab.

Except that there have been two dead pygmy sperm whales. One washed up last year on Folly Beach, less than two miles from the creek where the sample is being taken. The other washed up on Sullivan's Island in 2007. The whales were among 24 of 40 pygmy sperm or dwarf sperm whales stranded along the Southeast coast since 1997 that tested positive for domoic acid, an algal bloom toxin.

The students' test results will go to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at Fort Johnson. Lab classes at James Island are part of a nine-state coastal phytoplankton monitoring network, the eyes on the water along the crowding coast, a network that started in Charleston, working with schools.

Phytoplankton can create algae blooms like the "red tide." The blooms can create toxins that kill fish and other marine life. In a study released recently, University of South Carolina researchersfound domoic acid doesn't disperse with the bloom but sinks to the ocean floor and gets into the food chain.

Algal blooms occur when there are too many nutrients in the waters. Stormwater runoff pollutants like fertilizer, and discharges like treated sewage effluent, put nutrients in the water.

That study was done in California. But on its heels NOAA is releasing a study that found domoic acid in whales along the Southeast coast since 1997, including five of 11 stranded in South Carolina. Those five included the two in the Charleston area.

"We were surprised to find it here," said Steve Morton, a NOAA research oceanographer at Fort Johnson who founded and directs the network. The whales wouldn't even have been tested for the acid except that a high school student working with the network in Mississippi found the toxin in water there where a whale washed up.

Domoic acid has been linked to the deaths of whales, sea lions and other sea mammals, mostly on the West Coast. Domoic acid was blamed for a 1961 outbreak of wildly aggressive behavior among marine birds in California; it became part of the plot for Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic horror film, "The Birds."

Algal blooms haven't caused the problems here that they have in places as nearby as North Carolina. They don't occur often, and almost none of the blooms tested here have shown toxins. Only a small amount of domoic acid was found in the stranded whales; it almost certainly didn't kill them.

But when toxins show up, marine life suffers and shellfish beds are closed down. And phytoplankton shows up regularly in the James Island schools' testing, said Sue Morrison, marine biology teacher.

"We need to be out there, and maybe we should be looking for other (toxins) as well. If monitoring finds toxins, we need regular testing," said Emily Sekula-Woods, the University of South Carolina doctoral student who was the lead author of the USC study. "We might be more cautious about what we are dumping in the water. It might not be as friendly as we think."

Michael Struble and Eli Wilber, seniors at the James Island school, are among some 150 students in three classes who have had a hand in the sampling this year. Their results will go into a national database instead of being deleted in a year-end computer file dump.

"It's something that has real implications," Wilber said.