ODU faculty awarded $3 million to study algae blooms in Hampton Roads
NORFOLK — Real-time monitoring for harmful algal blooms is one step closer to becoming widely accessible, thanks to a $3 million grant awarded to a pair of Old Dominion University professors.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is funding the research of Margaret Mulholland and Eileen Hoffman into algal blooms in the Chesapeake Bay and other major region waterways.
An algal bloom, sometimes referred to as a “red tide,” is a cluster of algae that forms when the water is warm, slow-moving and full of nutrients. Those excess nutrients come from nitrogen and phosphorus pollution running off nearby land into the waterways from agriculture, stormwater and wastewater. The blooms in recent years are likely a result of recent rainy weather that washed more polluted runoff into bodies of water as well as hot, still weather. Though not all are toxic, some can cause rotten smells, such as one that took over the Virginia Beach Oceanfront in 2020.
Mulholland, who has been studying the problem for decades, said the algal blooms M. polykrikoides and A. monilatum are very harmful to wildlife, commercial fishing and tourism.
“The problem is from satellites, we can see chlorophyll. But we can’t always get boats out to see what it is,” she said. “Because the satellite can see ocean color, they can see the chlorophyll, but they can’t see whether it’s harmful or not.
“All plants have (chlorophyll). So we’ve been wanting to get better surveillance.”
Currently, samples are taken from local waterways, such as near the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club, for testing. Mulholland said some imaging equipment can cost upwards of $100,000, but smaller, build-your-own versions can cost about $2,000 in parts. Mulholland said the plan is to build about 30 of the smaller versions, and eventually deploy them around Hampton Roads with people who are on the water frequently to create an early alert system.
“Using (imaging equipment) is much easier to teach a student how to do than it is to teach them taxonomy and microscope skills,” said Peter Bernhardt, lab manager at ODU’s Phytoplankton Analysis Lab.
The machines take images of each plankton or other living things within the sample. In just a few milliliters of a water sample, dozens or hundreds of images can be taken. They can then be uploaded to databases, where harmful species can be identified. The goal, Mulholland said, is to provide real-time alerts when a harmful species is found.
“Then the modeling will be used to say, ‘Well, watch out for these places. You might not want to go fishing here, and might not want to go in the water there.’ That’s the objective of this project,” Mulholland said. “We’ll keep sampling (at the Norfolk Yacht and County Club) because we’ve determined this is a site where the blooms initiate. Once they initiate, they just get transported by the estuary in circulation. That’s not as big of a deal, but finding where they initiate is important because the conditions where they initiate may be really different from where they’re transported to.”
With the help of advanced technology and the funding, creating and storing libraries of images will become much more efficient than looking at each sample through a microscope. Mulholland said students really enjoy getting to work with the imaging technology, and now, the process to get images is much less destructive on the samples themselves.
“We’re really excited because we have all these stakeholder groups involved in this project, and this is sort of goes beyond science,” Mulholland said of the grant. “It’s to transition observation and capability to end users, so it’s a cool project.”
Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com
