Crimson Tide causes trouble in Australia

You see the headline, Crimson Tide closes beaches in Australia, and you wonder how can Alabama's football team be causing trouble way 'down under'?  But clearly this is what that 'Bama team is named after, a toxic dinoflagellate, a unicellular organism, and when they have a population explosion these tiny, microscopic, organisms can tint the water red in their uncountable numbers.  Their toxins can produce problems up the food chain because when consumed by slightly larger zooplankton and then eventually fish, or when consumed by filter feeding shell fish, they become toxic.  So such blooms as they are called are usually refered to as red tides, and one wonders how Moses got such a population explosion in the Nile just when he needed one.  But calling the red tide, crimson, certainly fooled me for a moment.  This news is from Sydney Australia whose huge harbor has dozens of little beaches and inlets that are usually not so red.  The normal colored, darker water has pushed the dinoflagellates close to shore, concentrated them, to produce the eerie red color.   

Don't drink water - green Lake Erie edition

Now the term "algae" is not very precise; it refers to any number of small green aquatic organisms, members of several clades (kingdoms), both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Under the right conditions unicellular green organisms can multiply at a remarkable rate (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, keep going for a few hours) resulting in algal blooms, vast population explosions of tiny green organisms. Blooms are not usually good things. Here's a great picture of an incredibly massive algal bloom in the shallow western basin of Lake Erie. That end of the lake is the warmest and it gets a lot of nitrogen laden runoff via a river from agricultural lands. The organism in question is Microcystis, a blue-green algae or more accurately a cyanobacterium, what my old phycology professor used to call "itty-bitty blue-green cells" in a Texas drawl. The number of cells it takes to turn a big lake green such that it can be seen from Earth orbit boggles the mind. Now here's the problem: it's toxic. Don't drink it; don't touch it. Don't let your dopey Lab lap it up. Now stop and think about how many people rely on Lake Erie for their drinking water. If what comes out of the tap looks like what's in this glass, that's a warning. Actually water purification plants do a pretty good job and you really have to concentrate a fantastic number of these tiny cells to get that much green, but you get the idea. These algal blooms are nothing new, but a warming climate will make such algal blooms larger, longer, and more frequent, something to get excited about. And to top it off, then human activities add fertilizer!