PETERSBURG – A new phytoplankton monitoring program being done by Petersburg Indian Association (PIA) will help alert recreational and subsistence shellfishers to harmful algal blooms in the area more quickly.
“There are types of phytoplankton that, in the spring or summertime or when the water starts to warm up, they start to come out of hibernation. And in some cases so much so that they form a bloom,” said PIA Tribal Resource Director Marco Banda who heads the monitoring program and administers the organization’s IGAP grant that funds it.
“What we’re doing is creating a baseline monitoring system to warn people ahead of time. We can’t necessarily shut anything down…but what we do is we expedite the information and we get focused on problem areas a lot quicker than normally,” Banda said.
He works with assistants Natocha Lyons and Jeff Simbahon to collect weekly water samples from Sandy Beach – a popular harvesting area on Mitkof Island – that they later analyze under a microscope.
The sampling involves casting a net into the water a number of times over the course of several minutes. The specially designed net allows phytoplankton and other small organisms to be captured and secured in a collection cup attached to the net’s base.
In addition to the weekly water samples, Banda and his team also record the salinity of the water, water and air temperature, and make notes on the weather and tide.
Though there are thousands of types of phytoplankton in the waters around the island, Banda and his team are looking only for those that are potentially harmful.
“We’re looking for specific types of phytoplankton. Usually they’re called diatoms and these little critters let off what’s called saxitoxins and that’s what makes PSP, paralytic shellfish poisoning,” he said.
Banda said that the project has been in the works for over a year, though it’s picked up steam in the last four months with staff receiving formal training in Sitka as part of the first Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins Partnership in November. Following the training, supplies, including microscopes used locally to look at sample specimens, secured and live sampling has begun on a weekly basis.
The data collected by Banda and his team will be entered into soundtoxins.org, which is tracking environmental conditions linked to harmful algal blooms (HAB) and helping to identify environmental factors that might serve as early detectors of an impending event. Sound toxins is funded by and linked with NOAA, the organization responsible for issuing warnings about areas at risk of producing shellfish that may cause PSP.
“In the past we’d have to ship out samples to different federal organizations for them to look at our samples and say ‘Oh yeah. You have a bloom.’” Banda said, adding that it sometimes took weeks before warnings were issued in areas experiencing a HAB.
Banda said that process is being brought to a more local level with a new Sitka-based lab in the works, which will be able to analyze samples collected from around Mitkof Island.
“We won’t have to go to another federal agency to get these samples tested. We’ll actually be able to test them there in Sitka and have the results super quick,” he said. “Therefore we can let the community know when it’s safe and not safe (to harvest).”
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