How Harmful Algal Blooms Are Poisoning California’s Marine Wildlife

1:00:00 (upbeat music) On today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, we're gonna be talking about a story that has to do with damoic acid. You're probably wondering what is damoic acid? It's actually something that causes marine mammals to die off the Pacific West Coast or the West Coast of North America. We're gonna be talking about what's happened happening to sea lions, dolphins, and other marine mammals, and seabirds that is causing a lot of people some concern. We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

1:00:40 So let's get into it. Hey everybody, my name is Andrew Lewin. Welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host. And this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about damoic acid and why this toxic algae is causing damoic acid to actually affect the lives of sea lions, marine mammals, and other marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, and how this has been going on for a lot longer than it has before. Four years ago, we started to detect this toxic algae in the waters off the Pacific Coast, off the West Coast of North America, in particular California, and that's caused a lot of concern for some people.

1:01:31 And we want to talk about it today, because I want to kind of go through and discuss a little bit about what this is all about, right? Just to talk about what damoic acid is and how it affects the body. The damoic acid is a neurotoxin produced by certain algal blooms, particularly those involving algae of the pseudonicisia. I think I pronounced that properly. When these blooms occur, the toxin can accumulate in small fish like sardines and anchovies, and then marine mammals, such as sea lions and dolphins, will consume these fish leading to poisoning, it leads to bioaccumulation. So these tiny, tiny fish will have a little bit of this neurotoxin, this algae in it, because that's what it eats, and then that gets eaten by larger marine mammals, such as sea lions and dolphins.

1:02:23 They start to accumulate as they eat many, many fish. They start to accumulate that toxin in the body, and it starts to get really, really bad, and it starts to lead to poisoning. So the affected animals exhibit symptoms like disorientation, lethargy, and seizures. Some display even behavior known as stargazing, where they tilt their heads back and gaze upwards, telltale sign of damoic acid poisoning. So in recent months, these are months, not just a couple of weeks, the situation has escalated. Rescue centers, such as the California, off the California coast, as the Marine Mammal Center, are overwhelmed. The Marine Mammal Care Center in Los Angeles, for instance, has been inundated with cases, hundreds of cases.

1:03:08 David Bader, which you're gonna hear from in a video that I've got queued up in a little bit, he's a marine biologist at the center, reported that there have been over 70 animals in their care just in that particular location, most suffering from damoic acid poisoning. So this is a big problem that's happening. I wanna play the video to give you a little bit more. It's affecting sea lions, dolphins, and you're gonna see in this clip, it actually is affecting birds as well, sea birds as well. So we're gonna hear a little bit about it. So just, I'm gonna just talk about, I'm gonna queue it up here. Oops. Still getting used to the software. All right, let's just queue it up.

1:03:49 Here we go. Struggling what this toxin does to these animals and what environmental factors could be contributing to these algae blooms that we've been seeing. Damoic acid is a neurotoxin. It affects obviously nerves, brain functions, and organ function as well. It causes things like seizures. You saw that a pelican kind of weaving its head. So, you know, repetitive behaviors like that. We see that in sea lions as well. Unfortunately, it can also cause death. This particular boom has been particularly legal for local marine life. Sea birds, dolphins, and sea lions have been impacted.

1:04:29 It's been going on about 10 weeks right now. We believe that, you know, ocean conditions are changing because of climate change, ocean acidification, and the vitrification of our coastal ocean. We're shifting the ocean's chemistry, and it's favoring these formations of these kinds of blooms. What contributes to it? Is there anything from our recent wildfires and some of the debris that's ended up in the water that's contributing to this as well? So the major driving factors of this, again, are climate change, ocean acidification, but also neutrification. So runoff, any kind of runoff, is going to contribute to these blooms. The fires certainly had, you know, maybe some nutrients, excess nutrients coming in from, you know, possibly the fire retardants might have had some of that.

1:05:18 All runoff though contributes nutrients to the ocean. And this is actually year four of a massive bloom just like this. So the fires might have contributed a little bit, but the major driving factors are beyond just that one event. So this is something we really need to be paying attention to. If we've entered the fourth year now, I see, you know, some of your workers here trying to care for these animals. Can you just talk about what type of impact this has, you know, even on your center? Yeah, well, on the center, we budget in a year for 300 patients over the course of a year. We're just now in April and we've already seen over 300 patients.

1:06:00 So impacts on us are certainly financial. I'm just going to stop it there because, you know, we get the picture in terms of what's happening. I'm going to put a link in the show notes if you want to support the Marine Mammal Care Center, because I think it's really important. You mentioned there that financial resources are tight because there have been so many animals. They only have a certain amount of funding and they can only handle what they budget for. And they don't budget for this type of incident, especially an incident that lasts so, so long. Normally when you get toxic algae blooms, like red algal blooms, you get, it lasts maybe for a few weeks, maybe a month. This has been happening for over a couple of months.

1:06:40 We're probably into the third or fourth month that has been happening. And we're starting to see more and more animals die in the care and more and more animals being affected along the coastline. So, you know, the root causes you talked about is not only harmful algal blooms, but they're complex. Climate change plays a significant role. Essentially how these algal blooms form is because of the heat in the water. The temperature of the water allows for these toxic algal blooms to form in ways that we've never seen before. Right. We haven't seen this amount and this, this length in a long time when you have algal blooms or you have algae that feed off of temperature off of a specific amount of nutrients like nitrates and phosphates.

1:07:37 And this is what happens essentially. You just get this perfect combination of conditions. Sea surface temperatures up, you get nutrient runoff, enough of nutrient runoff to support a bloom of this algae. It's just a plant and it blooms. And then what happens is it just blooms so much that eventually they all die off and they come to the shore or they get eaten by sardines. They get eaten by sea lions. They get eaten by dolphins and so forth and seabirds. And then those start to die. Those are the triggers and sort of the indicators of what's happening. They are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to these toxic algal blooms. Now we're lucky that we have testing with fisheries. So shellfish and other fish so that we don't get the humans who ingest seafood that would get affected by this don't get poisoned because testing is really important.

1:08:30 But sometimes that testing fails and you get people who have democ acid toxicity and they can die from it. It has happened before or less now because we know what to look for. But especially cases like this, I'm sure it's affecting the seafood industry along the shore. So it's affecting the economy. It's affecting the health of the animals. It's potentially affecting the health of people. And it's something that you don't want to be around with all these dead animals coming up on shore. All these affected animals. Not only is it heartbreaking to watch, but it's really difficult as someone who's carrying just like David here, who's carrying the people who are caring for them. They're watching these animals essentially die and suffer when they before they die. It's not an easy thing as a care professional to be able to see.

1:09:13 And this is something that needs to stop. How do we stop it? This is four years in a row that we've seen this type of stuff go on. Not something that's easy to stop. Unfortunately, we could limit nutrient runoff, but at point sources, which is mean like there's a pipe and that nutrient goes off. We can limit that by testing what's at the end of the day. But then you have non point source. You have non and appoint or end of pipe sources where it just comes in from anywhere. And that could be anything that comes in. They're very difficult to monitor. It's very difficult to find out what's happening. You'd have to come up with a whole coastal monitoring system to identify where these high phosphates, high nitrates are coming in. And those are the limiting factors to have this algae grow. But really, sea surface temperature increase, you can't control unless you start to reduce climate change, which is going to take along a very, very long time.

1:10:01 So this is a problem that's going to happen more and more as we as climate change gets worse or as climate change continues to wreak its ugly head. And we are going to have this problem. We are going to see more animals die. We're going to see the consequences in our water systems, the consequences in our shorelines, because we're going to see den animals come in. We've seen it happen in Florida where people go to the beach during these times and this just smells of death. Not a human being. It can affect people with breathing problems. It can affect people in terms of rotting flesh that's on the ground, rotting skin, rotting animals. Not good to breathe in. And it's something that we have to monitor. We have to be careful of. And we're not going to be able to go to certain beaches at certain times because of so much death happening and water quality not being good.

1:10:52 Water quality is something that I feel like here in North America, we take it for granted. It's not something that once it gets out of control, it's really difficult to monitor. Not monitor, but to kind of get back to normal because especially in a large system like the ocean, you just don't know where things are coming from. And so we have to make sure that we control with what we can control and control it now. That comes with government action. That comes with businesses and the private sector action. And that comes with people really taking climate change seriously, putting people in, voting people in power that really take climate change and reduction of climate change seriously, because we are going to see these consequences all of the time.

1:11:36 Increase the surface temperatures directly related to climate change. We're seeing this increase all the time. And this has happened four years in a row. Democas is happening long. Like this toxicity is happening longer and longer every year. And this is not going to stop until we get climate change under control. Not a fun story to share. It's not something that I wanted to share, but it's something that I feel like we need to watch. We need to make sure that sea lions like this one is, you know, under is safe and it can enjoy eating sardines and eating other and like fish like anchovies without having to worry about being sick. This is what they eat. And, you know, we've protected sea lions before with the man with the Magnus Carter Carter law. I think it's the fishing fisheries law that we have and brought sea lions back together, which helped bring great white shark populations back. And these are animals that we need to protect. And now that there's a water quality issue, this is really it's going to be a lot harder to protect. And we're really going to have to watch how we treat water quality in the future. And it's something that is not going to be easy to do because it works.

1:12:44 Just a few things could be too different for..." we need to talk about because sometimes talking about the ocean and looking at ocean conservation is not easy and we have to attack it. Some of the things that you can do to make it better is stay informed, keep a rest of what's happening and local advisories about algal blooms and affected areas.

1:13:30 You can volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center if they require it, if they need the help. You can support the rescue efforts by considering donating to the organizations like the Marine Mammal Care Center. And of course, you can advocate for change. So support policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions and controlling agricultural runoff. So every action counts. You don't have to just choose one. You can choose all of them, staying informed and staying involved. And then of course, we can all contribute to the health of our oceans and the creatures that inhabit them like sea lions, dolphins and seabirds, something those predators are important to our ecosystem. It's important to keep those food webs healthy and maintain those to help maintain our coastlines and maintain the oceans health, which helps maintain our health.

1:14:12 So that's it for today's episode. If you have any questions or comments and you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment below. If you are wanting to get a hold of me, you can go to speakupforblue.com, fill out the contact page, go to speakupforblue.com forward slash contact, fill out the page, it goes right directly to my email or you can DM me on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. That's out at how to protect the ocean. So if you want to get a hold of me, here's the sheet so you can do so. But I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.