ABOVE: © CORENDOIRT LGIONUELDING/MOTE MARINE LABORATORY
A singular scene from last year’s red tide event in the Gulf of Mexico sticks in the memory of phytoplankton ecologist Vincent Lovko. “I got to go up in a helicopter with a news crew,” Lovko says. “You could see the front of the bloom right along the coast”—a reddish cloud of millions of microscopic organisms called dinoflagellates floating in the water. “The striking part was all the little white dots, which were the dead fish.”
Red tides are caused by the dramatic reproduction of Karenia brevis, a species of dinoflagellate that is common in Gulf waters. Every year when conditions turn favorable, populations of the unicellular alga grow rapidly, dyeing undulating patches of water a brown, green, or rusty hue. Sometimes these events come and go in a matter of weeks or months. But the bloom that Lovko, a researcher at the Mote ...
