As Mother Nature Serves Up Another Doozy
By J. Lee Austin
In previous articles we touched on a few of the things that can threaten your beach vacay … fun stuff like angry sunburn, stingray stings and corneal abrasions from airborne sand. Today’s ramble addresses something entirely different … veritable bazillions of ruddy little denizens that come around every so often, most recently invading the upper Texas coast. Casually known as the “Red Tide” … this highly irritating affair is an invisible surprise attack on the respiratory systems of the unsuspecting, big, small and everything in-between. Even the Dachshunds were hacking up a lung.
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Fun factoid: You don’t have to actually see a red sea, to cough, sneeze and gag up your guts. Matter of fact, the water has actually been quite clear and gorgeous during this latest assault. Is that irony? Paradox? Both? Neither? Looks like this thing is affecting my compos mentis, as our bottom-feeding lawyer friends might say. Hi Ramzey!
So, when conditions are right (think bathwater), an algae known as Karenia brevis “blooms” … a rather interesting term for a pathogenic micro-monster that is reproducing wildly out of control, and each little dinoflagellate demon is producing its fair share of brevetoxin … a vile sauce that kills fish by the thousands and makes humans cough like chain-smoking Camel puffers.
Photo by Igor Savelev on Unsplash
If it’s any consolation, the tiny critter K. brevis really means us no harm. When the wave action ruptures their cell membranes, a noxious aerosol gets released into the atmosphere and the wind delivers it to our noses and throats. The toxin is thought to be a chemical defense against getting eaten by “grazers” … animals that swim around and gobble them up. Making a living at the bottom of the food chain is hard, I get it.
I just wish they didn’t have to be so bloody over-the-top about it. I mean, the fish kills are horrific, especially if you ask the fish, who are tasked with swimming in a poison soup that not only wrecks their gill function, but a nasty neuro-toxin makes them simply stop breathing when catastrophic electrical failure ensues. Talk about a bad day at the office.
But in defense of the obnoxious little Karenia, it’s understandable that if you get eaten so many times, eventually you figure out a way to evolve into something not so edible. By the way, the air is not the only thing to be avoided during a bloom … consuming any kind of shellfish in the danger zone is highly discouraged. I guess we don’t need to be discouraged from eating the fish, as they are so rottingly obvious about it.
It’s a good thing summer’s over and folks are back to school. Can you imagine this mess wafting in during the Fourth of July, when throngs of potentially asthmatic munchkins roam the sandy reaches, happily breathing in whatever comes their way.
Yikes. I guess the lesson is that if you’re coming during Red Tide season, be sure to bring the board games!
~ ~ j ~ ~
“Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” ~~ Benjamin Franklin
