“Mystery epidemic kills fish in Lake Merritt,” announced an Oakland Tribune headline.
“The lake water became a rusty color,” another journalist reported, causing “the drowning of countless bass.”
Sound familiar? Those reports come from newspapers in 1939, when a mass fish die-off, not unlike this week’s tragedy, struck the lake.
Over the course of history, the waters of Lake Merritt and the bay it’s attached to have lost marine life to both natural and human forces. In 1939, scientists attributed that year’s mass death to an invasion of microscopic aquatic creatures.
This time, the cause of death is a massive bloom of the algae species Heterosigma akashiwo, which appears to be depleting all the oxygen in the water and possibly emitting toxins.
But what is causing the algae bloom?
That’s the “billion dollar question,” said Eileen White, executive officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, which monitors water conditions.
Nobody knows the answer yet, and there’s likely to be more than one cause, but researchers and citizen scientists are rushing to learn as much as they can before the evidence—dead fish and rusty water—rots or floats away.
Full Story: https://oaklandside.org/2022/09/02/toil ... gae-bloom/
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