LEAMINGTON, ONT.—Early Wednesday morning, eight research vessels launched from the shores of Lake Erie. Five started from the American side, and three from the Canadian side. All had the same target: a slick of blue-green slime spreading across the lake’s western basin.Lake Erie is experiencing a harmful algal bloom that extends for roughly 50 kilometres, more than double the distance between Highway 427 and the Don Valley Parkway. Algae is a normal component of healthy freshwater ecosystems. But when certain species grow out of control, they can create dense, wide and sometimes poisonous mats of slime that threaten the whole food chain.That includes the species at the top of the food chain: humans. A bloom in Lake Erie in the summer of 2014 led to a multi-day drinking water ban in Toledo, Ohio, after officials detected algae-based toxins in the municipal water supply. Canadian researchers recently calculated that if Lake Erie’s harmful algal blooms are left unchecked, the financial hit to tourism, fisheries and other markets in this country will amount to more than $5.3 billion over the coming decades.The fifth anniversary of Toledo’s drinking water crisis passed last week, but the problem is not getting better with time. The five worst harmful algal blooms on record in Lake Erie have all occurred since 2011. This summer’s bloom has scientists on high alert. “This year’s looking like it’s going to be in the top couple. It’s as bad as it has been,” says Warren Currie, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) research scientist with the Burlington-based Great Lakes Laboratory for Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. Wednesday’s blitz was a co-ordinated, bi-national effort by more than a dozen academic and government research partners to characterize the physical, chemical and toxic properties of the bloom. Researchers refer to harmful algal blooms as HABs, and called the daylong effort the “HABs Grab.& ...
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