Every Day, Beach Cleaners Near Adelaide Remove 100s Of Pounds Of 1,000s Of Fish, Sea Creatures Killed By Algae Bloom
The circling, squawking gulls show where the bodies are buried. Early on a cold winter’s day, mucky foam and seaweed cover the sand at Grange beach – and the dead fish and leafy sea dragons. Every morning, council workers clear out the carnage left by the algal bloom killing South Australian marine life and causing “collective trauma” in the community.
Over 11km of coast from Grange to West beach, teams from the City of Charles Sturt fill bags with dead fish and animals that will end up as compost, collecting between 40kg and 200kg in a single day. They arrive before dawn and the daily walkers and their dogs, working to make the afflicted beaches more pleasant. Sometimes, community members make life easier in turn by taking it upon themselves to sort the carcasses into neat piles for them to collect.
“We started doing it because we felt we needed to just get it off the beach,” the coordinator of parks and biodiversity, Tyron Bennetts, says. As the scale of the bloom became clear, they started cataloguing and weighing what they picked up each day.
SA’s algal bloom probably started in January and, over months, has grown to more than 4,500 sq km. By March, surfers complained of a mysterious sea foam, along with irritated eyes and hacking coughs. The algae species responsible was identified as Karenia mikimotoi. By July it had hit metropolitan beaches: suddenly many more people were witnessing the foam, the piles of seaweed as kelp died off and the animal deaths. Karenia mikimotoi is not toxic to humans, although it can cause eye, nose and throat irritation. But it has proved catastrophic for fish and marine animals. The iNaturalist site has logged about 34,000 dead animals from about 480 different species.
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