Miami, Mar 17 (EFE).- A group of experts from the University of Central Florida has successfully tested in Sarasota Bay, on the west coast of the state, a potential and “promising” treatment against red tide, a phenomenon seasonally more recurrent and devastating in the Gulf of Mexico.
The tests, led by the biologist and professor at that university Kristy Lewis and carried out in conjunction with the Mote marine laboratory, represent the first successful test carried out in open water to reduce red tide, which usually causes the massive death of fish and other marine organisms.
“It is quite promising,” Lewis told EFE this Friday, about the preliminary results of the large-scale tests carried out between the end of February and the beginning of March, and which are based on a technique called “clay flocculation” that is based on the use of a type of clay.
During the experimentation, the researchers placed eight plastic tubes, 6 feet (1.8 meters) wide, that extended from the surface of the water to the sea floor. Some “giant test tubes”, in the words of Lewis.
CLAY AGAINST MICROORGANISMS
The researchers sprayed four of those tubes with clay treated with a chemical compound that, once in the water, managed to attract the microorganism Karenia brevis, which is responsible for Florida’s red tide, and sank it to the bottom of the ocean.
As Lewis explains, water samples have been collected to find out what happens to the toxins from the algae when they fall to the bottom of the ocean and whether they remain dormant or active.
But what he seems safe to point out is that the tests “reduce an immediate acute impact of red tide,” Lewis says, not least because the toxins aren’t released into the air, which is what causes respiratory irritations and eyes.
The tests were done after three years in which Lewis began with tests in laboratories, then in 20-liter tanks and thus scaled to larger and larger environments.
During that time, he also tested the impact of clay on the ocean ecosystem, especially on invertebrates such as blue crabs, sea urchins, and clams.
“We want to make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease,” he said.
The next steps will be taken based on the results of the samples, but there are already plans to investigate what happens if this treatment is used near seagrass beds and then distributed by tides and currents.
The expert shows her confidence that these tests could lead to a “mitigation strategy” for a phenomenon that there is no way to prevent and poses a risk to human health, among other things due to the toxins released by the fish that die at cause of red tide.
LOSSES TO TOURISM
It also means millions in losses, as reflected in a study by the University of Miami, according to which in 2018, when one of the recent great red tide phenomena occurred, there was a 61% decrease in all types of trips to Florida.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has warned that there is a red tide on the west coast of this state, specifically in Pinellas, Sarasota, Charlotte, Hillsborough, Manatee, Collier and Lee counties. , and lower in Monroe.
Nearly 6,000 pounds (about 2,700 kilos) of dead fish have been removed from its waters in the last 11 days on the beaches of Indian Rocks Beach in Pinellas County alone, and another 3,000 kilos in Manatee County.
Lewis estimated that this year there could even be a confluence of this phenomenon along with that of sargassum, given the giant mass of seaweed up to 5,000 miles wide (about 8,000 kilometers) moving through the Atlantic and could head towards the Gulf of Mexico coast in Florida.
