Established in 1867 / Volume 71, Number 20 January 21, 2001 Wilmington, N.C. $1.50¢ Home delivery 36¢

water, indicate whether a certain The blooms can kill people as well, toxin is present. as UNCW chemist Jeff Wright knows. They envision a dipstick-type Algae becomes Dr. Wright led an emergency effort device that changes colors much like by the Canadian government in 1987 a pregnancy test. to figure out what poisoned more Dr. Baden has developed a method than 100 people in Montreal, of testing for brevetoxin, the killer in UNCW project including four who eventually died. red tides, and submitted it to the The victims had eaten mussels at Food and Drug Administration. exactly what it was like two days ago local restaurants. As it is now, officials screening BY BRIAN FEAGANS when the fish died,” Dr. Tomas said. A group of 30 scientists worked shellfish for the toxin have only one Staff Writer “Marine systems are very dynamic. around the clock for 104 hours before federally approved method: inject More than 5 million fish had died They’re constantly changing. You fingering little-known microscopic samples into a mouse and see if it in creeks feeding Rehoboth Bay have to be thinking like the ocean, algae as the killer. dies. when puzzled Delaware officials got a the way the tides are going in and The Pseudo-nitzschia were pro- Florida is funding the research as a phone call from UNCW researcher out.” ducing a potent acid that causes way to save mice and time. Carmelo Tomas in September. The scientific community has neurons in the brain to keep firing Last year, Dr. Baden also landed a An activist with the Surfrider identified at least 38 places along the until they explode. $5.2 million grant from the National Foundation had scooped up a water U.S. coast known to have recurring Many of the survivors still have Institutes of Health to study the sample from beneath a silvery mat of problems with toxic blooms, short-term memory loss. impact of red tides on the human res- dead fish and sent it to the Univer- according to the National Office for One math professor has to write piratory system. sity of North Carolina at Wilming- Marine Biotoxins and Harmful Algal down where he parked before The outbreaks can cause asthma- ton. Blooms in Woods Hole, Mass. entering a grocery store. “That’s like symptoms. But little is known In it, Dr. Tomas found an unlikely In 1972, researchers only knew of how he finds his car when he’s done about how they move from the water killer - the same toxin that has 16 hot spots. shopping,” Dr. Wright said. to the air and into the human body. poisoned manatees and closed shell- More marine killers are found fish beds during Florida red tides. Good thing Shop of horrors each year. The question is whether The potent chemical, called gone bad Work at the UNCW lab is often there are more harmful algal blooms brevetoxin, had never been seen in Most of the time algae are giving serious, but that doesn’t mean there in the water, or simply more scien- Delaware waters before. life, not taking it. Fueled by sunlight isn’t space for a little humor. A velvet tists looking for them. And the news got worse. and nutrients, the microscopic plants portrait of Elvis is the only item Dr. Baden believes it’s the former. Producing the toxin were common form the base of the food chain in the locked in a waist-high cage in one of “We haven’t seen a billion fish algae - Chattonella cf. verruculosa - world’s oceans. A single-celled the lab’s hallways. dying in the Neuse River before,” Dr. found up and down the East Coast, plankton that dines on algae in the “It’s because he’s so dangerous,” Baden said. And Atlantic waters only UNCW researchers believed. morning is lunch for the clam that Dr. Baden joked. recently showed the spread of a life- Delaware officials say the jury is ends up dinner for an egret. The same could be said of the toxic threatening toxin in shellfish south to still out on that conclusion. A small portion of algae - less than clouds swirling in shades of green, Martha’s Vineyard, he said. But at the very least, the discovery 2 percent by most estimates - give brown and red in the three rooms Others are added another suspect to the murder the group a bad name. Some are so that always stay locked at the lab. more skeptical mysteries that sprout from the toxic that just a fleck can kill a human. Some glass jars hold the descendants world’s oceans and sounds in greater North Carolina got a rude intro- of a 1958 red tide off Florida. Others Others in the field are more numbers each year. And it underlined duction to the problem in 1987 when froth with Pfiesteria from the New skeptical, pointing out that the his- UNCW’s growing role in studying a Florida red tide shot up the Gulf River in Onslow County. torical record is too unreliable to be harmful algae. Stream to the Morehead City area. Despite the underlying detective sure the blooms are on the rise. Daniel Baden, who left the Univer- Some beachgoers developed respi- work, the daily routine in the lab The scientists tend to agree on sity of Miami last year to head up the ratory problems from inhaling the doesn’t exactly hold the drama of a one point: Man is probably exacer- new Center for Marine Science at fumes. And shellfish beds were put whodunit. bating the problem. UNCW, has assembled a formidable off limits, dealing a $25 million blow After capturing toxic algae in the Natural blooms that have come team of scientific sleuths on the to the industry. wild, the scientists have to recreate and gone with little notice in the past banks of Masonboro Sound. But it took recurrent outbreaks of the natural conditions that make may be feeding on the nutrients that At times, the dozen chemists, Pfiesteria piscicida in the 1990s to them produce lots of toxin. bleed off farms, city streets and biologists and geneticists act much bring serious concern, and eventually They then go through the labo- lawns. As a result, they grow larger like detectives in a lab on the second research dollars, to the Tar Heel rious process of distilling the toxin and last longer, the theory goes. floor of the $17.5 million center. State. Pfiesteria has been blamed for down to its purest form, and insert “Maybe we’re opening up opportu- They pinpoint a killer, then deter- killing more than a billion fish in vials of the material into a freezer nities for species that were lurking in mine the conditions - such as salinity North Carolina and causing memory kept at minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit. the background all the time but were and the amount of sunlight - when it loss and other health problems for Then comes the hard part. The sci- holding back,” Dr. Tomas said. is likely to strike again. some exposed fishermen. entists have to figure out how the Whatever the cause, the UNCW All this while working in the very Red tides have killed hundreds of algae work - what makes them grow, researchers were reminded in the fall medium - water - known to wash manatees in Florida. And in Califor- what causes them to produce toxin how far-reaching the problems with away clues at most crime scenes. nia, tiny toxin-producing algae turned and what, if anything, can stop them. toxic algae can be. “The crazy thing about working in some 400 sea lions into floating The UNCW lab is trying to develop No sooner had they put the lid on water is that you’re never sure this is corpses. liquid solutions that, when added to the Chattonella samples from Dela- ware than word arrived of unex- plained penguin deaths at a zoo in Newport, Kan. Officials there sus- pected something the penguins ate, so they sent UNCW a batch of fish used as feed. Mixed in with the herring were California-caught anchovies with traces of domoic acid, the very same toxin that had killed the people in Montreal and later claimed the lives of pelicans and sea lions in the Golden State. Dr. Baden said the team couldn’t prove they had found the smoking gun, because concentrations of the toxin were too low to kill a penguin. The fish sampled weren’t from the same batch fed to the penguins. So the anchovies actually consumed could have had lethal doses of the toxin, Dr. Baden said. “We found out they were only feeding anchovies to the smaller pen- guins,” he said, “so you could have had a situation where you were con- centrating all your toxin in a few ani- Staff photo/ JEFFREY S. OTTO mals.” UNCW research technician Johnny Lancaster uses a multichannel pipetter to fill and Elisa plate with a Apparently, in a world with toxic blocking buffer in a lab devoted to the study of toxic algae at the UNCW Center for Marine Science. Research algae, not even a penguin in Kansas is technician Allison Weidner works in the background. safe.

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