Massive, Destructive Algal Blooms May Be Lake Erie's New Normal

Almost the entirety of Dave Spangler's life takes place on or very near Lake Erie. If he's not piloting a charter fishing boat around the Great Lake, he's home in Toledo at his condo--just 100 feet from the shore. Spangler is the president of the Lake Erie Waterkeepers and a board member of the Lake Erie Charter Boat Association; he's owned his own charter boat business for 20 years, and began working on the lake in 1978. Then, after a nearly a century of neglect and unchecked industrialization on its shores, the lake was finally beginning to recover from what had seemed like ecological death.

"It got very, very nice nice," Spangler recalls in a phone conversation, before setting off for the day. "The water was beautiful." Lake Erie kept improving, and, for the next decades as he built his business, all was relatively good on the lake. But something more subtle was happening to the surrounding drainage than the changes produced by the factories that had first threatened the 9,940 square-mile freshwater lake.

New farming practices resulted in a sharp increase in phosphorus running off into Erie and, in 2011, heavy rains made those levels spike even more dramatically. Blue-green algae (also known as cyanobacteria) went nuts for the stuff, gobbling up the fertilizer and spreading quickly into what's known as an algal bloom, an event of rapid uncontrolled growth and accumulation of algae leading to often severe environmental and human health consequences.

"[The water was] plain old ugly," Spangler says. "It was basically pea soup green. It was green everywhere, dark green. One day it was so thick it slowed the boat down. It's very obvious when you're on the water; people smell it. It didn't go over very well with my clients." Business dropped for Spangler about 25 percent in 2011. It was the worst algal bloom ever recorded on Lake Erie.

It seems like we don't hear too much about good ol' fashioned pollution these days, what with rivers not catching on fire so much anymore and oil spills, fracking, and global warming hogging all the headlines. Your local factory--if you still have one--steadily leaking sulfuric acid into a drainage in an unfashionable part of town seems a bit less likely to feed the news cycle. Part of this is that conventional air and water pollution have just gotten better, at least within most developed nations, thanks to things in the U.S. like the Clean Water Act and Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

A great example of things getting better is indeed Lake Erie, the second-to-last Great Lake sandwiched between industrial Western Ontario and industrial Ohio, hope to rusty locales such as Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, and the city of Erie, with Detroit just upriver. In the '60s and '70s, the lake was infamously declared "dead" in many places. Water without life.

In a 2005 piece on kayaking the lake, The New York Times put it well: "The lake, after all, is where the Rust Belt meets the water." Sewage and waste runoff from the heavy industry ringing its shores pummeled the lake into submission, with the result being bacteria-clogged beaches, massive fish kills, algae blooms, and beyond. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, helping turn the state of the lake--and the many other bodies of water in the U.S. just as bad off--into a nationwide very big deal.

In 1972, the Clean Water Act passed and, coupled with many more localized efforts (like modernizing sewers), the situation gradually improved. In 1999, mayflies returned to Lake Erie after some 40 years of absence. Of course, the trend hasn't continued: see above.

Blooms are both a signifier of ecosystem health and a cause of it. They typically happen when lakes receive an excessive amount of agricultural runoff containing phosphorus from fertilizer. The algae go nuts in response to the increased nutrients, and multiply and die like crazy. As a result, a body of water becomes clogged with the algae, which block out needed light and reduce oxygen needed for other organisms as the algae decomposes. The end result is deadness, including the short-lived algae itself.

A study out this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests what happened in 2011 is another new normal. Changing agricultural processes and increased rainfall due to climate change should make massive, unprecedented blooms commonplace. The result?

Carnegie researcher Anna Michalak, the study's lead author, explained in an email that the green slime can cause, "hypoxic conditions in the lake that can be harmful to aquatic life. She continued, saying "blooms result in higher water treatment costs for cities using the lake as a water suppler. The specific cyanobacteria in the 2011 bloom also release toxins that can be harmful to aquatic species and to people." Sorry, beachgoers.

Michalak explained the shift in agricultural practices that brought us back to a potentially dead ecosystem:

The main trends in agricultural practices that we found to be consistent with the increased nutrient loading that we observed in 2011 were the autumn (as opposed to spring) application of fertilizer, fertilizer being broadcast onto the surface of the soil (rather than incorporated into the soil), and the increasing use of conservation tillage or no-till practices.  Looking into 2012, we saw that that Lake Erie basin was also catching up with national trends towards fertilizer-intensive corn production, and the reduction of farmland in the Federal Conservation Reserve program.  We do not necessarily want to reverse all of these trends – Some of the agricultural practices were designed in response to valid environmental goals.  The key is to examine all of the interrelated factors that can lead to blooms together, and recognize the complexity of the system in forging a path forward.

Another factor is the continued invasion of zebra mussels, a non-native species thought to have arrived in the Great Lakes in the ballast water of a Russian cargo ship. The mussels are able to dominate a lake quickly, smothering other varieties of mussels and filtering and clarifying the water, resulting in more sunlight reaching algae and a greater likelihood of catastrophic blooms. They also change the nutrient cycling of a body of water, possibly making the phosphorus more available to cyanobacteria , who then thrive even more.

The mussels hit Lake St. Claire, a sort of mini-Great Lake north of Detroit and upstream of Lake Erie, first in the late-80s and spread onward. Growing up in part around said lake, I remember the local beaches becoming quickly covered in massive mats of green slime. Being eight and very into swimming, it was a bummer. I can still feel it squishing around my toes. Interestingly, even as Lake Erie suffers, water flowing into it from Lake St. Claire and other upstream bodies of water has gotten cleaner.

Michalak notes, however, that Lake Erie's problem is the same problem in a great many other bodies of water across the globe: "Examples of eutrophic lakes with severe toxic cyanobacterial blooms include Lake Taihu in China, Lake Winnipeg in Canada, and Lake Nieuwe Meer in the Netherlands," she says. "It’s a big problem!"

Spangler, meanwhile, is unsurprised by the new study's findings. It's more or less what the Waterkeepers have known since 2011. "[These are] the same concerns we've had for some time now," Spangler says. "Agricultural practices need to change."

The study is more support for their case, however. With funding from the state, Spanger's organization does outreach to farmers within the lake's drainage area (about 4.8 billion acres of farmland falls in that category). Sometimes it's as easy as reminding farmers that fertilizing in the winter isn't helpful, or pointing out that they're overusing fertilizer.

"There's also studies that indicate that there's a third of the fields out there that have too much phosphorus on them," Spangler says. There's an upper limit as to how much good phosphorus can do. Past it, you're just wasting chemicals and punishing the lake downstream.

Cutting down on phosphorus won't put farmers out of business, but not changing threatens the vast pool of industries that depend on the lake, as well as the 11 million people that depend on the lake for drinking water. "The seven counties bordering Lake Erie account for about 30 or 35 percent of tourism in Ohio," he adds. "Businesses are going to go under."

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv or @everydayelk.