Florida's marine ecosystem might be posing a serious threat to the already endangered sea turtles living there, according to a presentation held Tuesday at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Karen Arthur, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Fla., said that lyngbya, a toxic cyanobacteria that obtains its energy through photosynthesis, is to blame for the health problems affecting sea turtles in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Lyngbya lives among sea grass, which is the main food source of sea turtles.
When exposed to the blooms of bacteria, sea turtles might face disease and malnutrition.
The turtles might choose to eat around the lyngbya, but if they ingest the bacteria, they are being exposed to toxins that form fibropapilloma, a disease in which benign tumors grow around turtles' eyes and mouths as well as on their flippers and internally, Arthur said.
"So if the tumors grow in their eyes and they cannot see, or if they grow in their mouth and they cannot feed properly, they become targets for prey or might die of starvation," she said.
Florida has a large population of sea turtles, 50 percent of which are suffering from fibropapilloma off the East Coast of the state.
The lyngbya blooms are also affecting the reproduction cycles through malnutrition problems, Arthur said.
About nine months before female turtles get ready to lay eggs, they eat all of the nutrients they can possibly find. This is because female turtles go without eating once they are nesting, she said.
The female's intestinal tract is emptied to fit the eggs, at which point she feeds off her fat stores.
"If an algal bloom compromises their food source before they begin to nest, they could go an even longer period of time without eating," Arthur said.
In a study done a few years ago, scientists discovered that the blooms were causing female turtles to abort the eggs, which is a serious problem when dealing with an endangered species.
The toxins of the lyngbya could have affected the female turtles, or they could have been avoiding it altogether and not eating, she said.
"Whichever way you look at it, blooms of lyngbya are really bad for sea turtles," Arthur said.
Arthur said the cause of the blooms is still under discussion. The biggest targets of discussion are the nutrients entering the system that naturally wouldn't. These nutrients are sewage, fertilizers and other things being released into the water by humans.
The lyngbya blooms are also affecting people. The blooms were actually brought to scientists' attention after fishermen were developing rashes in sensitive areas of their bodies, Arthur said.
It wasn't until recently that researchers decided to test the effect of lyngbya blooms on sea turtles and other marine animals.
Joe Gaspard, a UF graduate research assistant, is amazed at how something so small can have such a huge effect.
"With that many toxins, we want to look at something like that where a lot of things get hidden," he said. "For the most part it's been around, but not to this extent."
