Hey I’m no expert on cyanobacteria, but exploring nature, peeping through microscopes, and teaching botany, they crop up. Having the amazing ability to type words into Google and to read the results makes me a qualified Internet pundit! I self-declare a Ph.D. in cyanobacteriology.
Pundits love to define terms. Algae and so-called bluegreen “algae” are a point of vocabularial confusion apparently beyond the comprehension of newscasters. A complicating factor is that “algae” is a tough term to define, more descriptive of a lifestyle than of biological relationship. A grab bag of simply constructed non-flowering water-dwellers. That is a license to use a term loosely. Yet there is another way to see it. Bacteria are more crisply defined. Bacteria (and Archaea) are profoundly different from all other living things, right down to their basic biochemistry. For vocabulary lovers they are prokaryotes as opposed to the eukaryotic algae. The bluegreen “algae” are bacteria, cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria crop up in disparate contexts:
- As symbionts, the main “botany classroom” role. Cyanobacteria are “good guys” as the right species in the right roles. Many cycads have “coralloid roots” poking aboveground looking pathological but actually inhabited by beneficial, symbiotic, photosynthetic, nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. (Nitrogen-fixers convert atmospheric nitrogen to “fertilizer.”) If you bust apart the floating fern Azolla…lots in South Florida…it has cyanobacteria folded into its leaves, making it a rice paddy fertilizer. Cyanobacteria can inhabit the traps of carnivorous bladderworts and turn up inside hollow-water-holding cells in sphagnum moss. The “alga” in some (cyano)lichens can be a cyanobacterium.
- Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria living freely, or perhaps not completely free, in the dirt and in hydric soils bring nitrogen to the earth. During wet weather, great green globs of cyanobacteria jelly rise into prominence on the soil surface.
- On wet surfaces. Sometimes before I powerwash the patio, it is interesting to scrape the stains and see under the microscope who it is: fungus? green alga? cyanobacteria? Often the last-mentioned looking like dark pain on concrete and stones.
- In canals, lakes, and rivers. Summer in Florida, and “algae” in the news again! True algae, cyanobacteria, aquatic weeds, associated microbes and creatures, red tides, and dead zones are all part of the evil syndrome relating to our over-fertilized, over-nutrient-enriched, over-hyped Florida active adult lifestyle. We’re a wet state, not that these problems are unique to Florida, and natural aquatic systems did not evolve dealing with all the nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients humanity puts in the water. Natural ecosystems evolved in a balance with “normal” nutrient levels, and when the levels skyrocket, some lifeforms suffer, while others benefit to the point of trouble.
Rising from the wet earth
Same as above, microscope view.
A windowsill experiment to see this is to put pondwater in four soda bottles. In one bottle put no fertilizer, and then increasing amounts in all the others. One drop in one, two drops in the next, and so forth. Wait a month. A harmful algal bloom right before your eyes!
How many sources of nutrient enrichment can you think of? Organic decay, sewage, septic systems, manure, biosolids, fertilizers. Twenty-some million Floridians and tourists generate oodles of sewage. Treatment does not remove all the nutrients, even passage through artificial wetlands. One way to shed nutrient-loaded sewage treatment water is as reclaimed irrigation water, inviting turf and ornamentals to take up the nutrients, and those nutrients are back into the ecosystem.
Agriculture comes up in the news about the polluted Lake Okeechobee system: manure, fertilizers, backpumping. And then there are biosolids, treated sewage sludge spread onto the earth.
As anyone who watches the news would know, releasing nutrient-enriched waters from Lake Okeechobee causes unwanted aquatic life where the water goes: unnatural weed infestations in the Everglades and harmful algal/cyanobacterial blooms along the rivers draining the lake, extending into the sea. That unwanted growth, especially the cyanobacteria “algae,” make dangerous toxins.
There are plenty of targets for the finger of blame, and authorities from whom to demand action. No need to repeat the usual list of suspects. I would not want to be any of them, because cures are not obvious, nor without downsides, and as Pogo croaks from the polluted swamp, the enemy is us. Florida was never meant to host a gazillion people.
Many stains on rocks and concrete are cyanobacteria.
Which sources of trouble can we control? Ample room for argument, but most controls will be tweaks, details, adjustments, NIMBY, and redirections. How do you diminish sewage nutrients, agriculture, and too much rain in Lake Okeechobee (restore more natural outflow?)? Curtail Florida development? Heresy! Seems to many observers, and recall my amateur status with no data, one actionable point might be limiting residential fertilizer applications, which might mean we don’t all need a big sprawling St. Augustine lawn.
Cyano-soup
It isn’t just the Lake Okeechobee system of course. This summer the eutrophic canals and ponds suddenly have smelly floating mats of green. Close examination of a floating mat is eye-opening. Tried it yesterday in a stagnant canal in Jupiter, speaking over over-development.
The mat from canal yesterday, dominated by Cyanobacteria (the striated filaments).
The mat is a tapestry dominated by filamentous cyanobacteria (marked by their cross-striations) interwoven with filamentous algae, varied single-celled algae and alga-like organisms, wriggling animalcules, and decaying globs of organic matter. Those decaying globs sink, stink, and take up oxygen as they go.
CLICK for a 40 second flyover.
One of the abundant filamentous ones is called Oscillatoria. It wiggles like some sort of mud-dwelling worm. CLICK to see the wiggle (about 40 seconds).
This may be an artifact of my limited experience, but that experience so far finds unicellular (sometimes clinging into clusters) cyanobacteria in the St. Lucie River, with the filamentous types (strings of rectangular or circular cells) in the floating mats on canals.
John Bradford
George Rogers
George Rogers
Dee Staley
Treasure Coast Natives 
theshrubqueen
June 25, 2018 at 2:56 pm
Thanks, George I will share this. I would love to know how the algae/cyanobacteria makes the toxins. I am working in Atlanta this summer, water quality controls are built into every step of their land development codes down to the landscape plans. Lots of bioretention and requirements for native plant material.
George Rogers
June 25, 2018 at 4:29 pm
Amelia, the thing about the toxins…are they adaptive as antibiotics, merely incidental to metabolism, or other?
theshrubqueen
June 25, 2018 at 4:30 pm
Yes!
Linda Grashoff
June 25, 2018 at 3:49 pm
Cool post, but you’ll want to fix the typo on prokaryotes, on the next to the last line in the second paragraph.
George Rogers
June 25, 2018 at 4:27 pm
ok thanks
hope
June 25, 2018 at 11:48 pm
Thanks again for another timely post!
We’re all seeing the dreaded soylent green Cyanobacteria floats parading down our canals,
and bubbling up in our lakes the past few weeks….
and their numbers seem to be growing.
Do any of the aggressively proliferating Cyanobacteria in our polluted spring waters and fresh water canals have “natural” predators / consumers / pathogens (assuming the offending over-zealous cyanobacs are indeed part of the native Florida ecosystem….and not just another invasive exotic pest species)?
We observe, in the spring-fed canals near our home, that when submerged or floating plants (even the controversial “Hydrilla” and “Water Lettuce”) are allowed to proliferate to a “balance” point, we have few, if any, nasty Cyanobacteria “blooms.” However, when herbivores or aquatic plant control herbicides wipe out too many aquatic plants too quickly, the cyanobacteria, with few nutrient consuming competitors left, rather too enthusiastically fill that nutrient-consuming niche in the ecosystem….seemingly with few, if any, cyanobacte-vores (I know that’s probably not a real word) rushing to the scene to enjoy the soylent green “feast.”
So….when the grad students and their professors put the spring river-polluting Cyanobacteria under the scope…do they ever see “someone” else – a cyanobacteria predator or pathogen – eating or otherwise molesting the cyanobacs to death, or at least down to manageable numbers?
It’s unlikely the majority of humans will ever be honest enough to recognize that WE are the planet’s organism most in need of a reduction in population density and proliferation…the organism whose daily activities presently threaten the Earth’s ecosystems’ natural balance the most.
It’s easy to convince an Eco-conscious couple to recycle, consume only organic or free-range, even eschew the lawn fertilizers and pesticides to embrace a “Florida-friendly” drought tolerant native landscape; but how many “eco-conscious” couples are willing to go childless or adopt an already existing human?
(Cricket sounds).
So…in the mean time….as conscientious waterfront homeowners hand-rake the Hydrilla or Lyngbya, and forward-thinking Aquatic Plant Management folk cooperate by dialing back the herbicide in favor of well-timed Aquatic Plant Harvester “harvests,” might there also be a few native Cyanobacteria consumers quietly at work helping us all curb the Cyanobacteria’s efforts to rule the water world?
Just curious to know their names if they exist….so I can add them to my list of “Things I’m Grateful for” each day :). It’s always nice to know even the quietest crusaders’ names whenever we find ourselves “not alone” in whatever small steps we’re taking to be more in balance with the greater Ecosystem supporting us all.
So….my favorite storyteller since Dr. Seuss…..do tell us more – were there feasts and were there wars – in that microcosmic soup of blue-green goop you scooped from the water this week?
George Rogers
June 26, 2018 at 9:35 am
Hope, What a thought provoking note on topics perhaps not adequately considered. I don’t know of anything that eats cyanobacteria, but that’s probably old fashioned ignorance. They seem defended with slimes and toxins, but the who eats whom is one big evolutionary race with no guarantees of perfect protections. Good point that bodies of water with a lot of weeds aren’t generally choked with cyanobacteria. I’ve been noticing a difference in infestation levels from pond to pond even around my subdivision. Thanks for expanding the post! Will sure keep my radar on along your lines of thought.
George Rogers
June 26, 2018 at 5:26 pm
My friend Travis Walker e-mailed with info showing in the laboratory a connection between cyano bacteria and red tides…with the cyanobacteria becoming nutrition for the dinoflagellates responsible for most red tides.
hope
June 26, 2018 at 11:25 pm
Wow…be careful what I wish for, right….I didn’t stop to think that potential natural predators / consumers of toxic cyanobacteria could be even more deadly monsters than the cyanos themselves.
Very scary to think of red-tide like organisms being the opportunistic cyano-consumers that rush into our our polluted, nutrient-overloaded, cyanobacteria-populated springs, rivers, lakes, and aquifers to feast on the cyanobac thugs already disrupting the system.
Have Florida planners, politicians, and growth “planners” not read their Old Testament…or Travis’s emails, or your Treasure Coast Natives’ posts clearly illustrating some of the ecological signs – handwriting already on the wall – that even a modern day arrogant empire of capitalists and consumers can swiftly be humbled or destroyed by the wanton over-consumption of vital natural resources, and coincident neglect of the natural habitats necessary to sustain an exponentially growing human population living on increasingly urban land cover?
Like the 1970s public service message once reminded: “Where there is water, there is life….Where there is no (clean) water there is no life.”
(And hey, politician-patricians making the short-sighted decisions on our shared environment…no clean water, no crops, no tourism, no real estate value, and eventually no proletariat left to pay taxes to the state, or do the real work – the manual labor – necessary to sustain our once comfy “first world” culture.)
It really bites that environmental disasters are such broad-spectrum “punishers” these days.
It seemed so much more “just” in the storied “old days” when the environmental “plagues” targeted only the Pharoahs, and left their slaves unharmed.
A polluted Florida aquifer, sadly, in real life, poisons all.
Thanks again George, John, and Dee, for keeping us posted on the environmental state of the Florida “empire.”
Sometimes the news is hard to hear…but we all need to hear it.
…and no one tells it better than Treasure Coast Natives :).
George Rogers
June 27, 2018 at 10:37 am
Glad you mentioned the aquifers. As you note, the problem is not just the canals and rivers. I’m sure you’ve seen in the news how, say, Silver Springs is no longer pristine, or the wildcat “experiment” in Miami where red dye from a limestone quarry made it via aquifer-express into tapwater.
Linda Grashoff
June 28, 2018 at 10:28 am
What a rich exchange you have going here, George. I wish I could add something, but all I can say is woe is us—and the world.