Blog 4 - Red Tide

Since I recently did my essay, "A day in the life of a microbe,” about the Red Tide, I did a bit more research about it, and searched “Red Tide” on the New York Times webpage.

    Apparently, back in September of 2012, there were reports of a Red Tide pandemic in the Yangtze River of China. The water changed from the typical warm and brown, to a colder and rusty orange color. This was due to a “crimson current advancing alongside a stretch of untainted water.” The red tide is usually caused by an algae, and that’s what scientists thought this was; an algal bloom. The bacteria in the algae tend to feed off of warm and salty water and because of the climate change in China in 2012, the Red Tide algae blooms began to appear more and more. 

   Tests have been performed throughout the world to see what causes such a large spread. Reports of the Red Tide have come from Iran, Senegal, Russia, Ukraine, France and Turkey. Most reports in the United States tend to be from the Gulf of Mexico. The algae are a big concern. They can attack fish and can even be poisonous to humans (typically harmless, but can cause skin irritations). So it’s important to understand it, and see if these blooms are on the rise.

  

 This article wouldn't be very interesting to most people, especially if they haven’t learned much about the Red Tide. There would be a lot of questions about this article if there wasn't any prior research. Red Tide algae blooms can lead to high quantity aquatic life deaths, and is a big concern.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/a-red-tide-epidemic/