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Since installing the instrument in the Gulf last fall, Campbell checked the output from the instrument daily to develop a set of images of the local plankton species. She planned to use those images to train the computer to automatically identify samples from the Cytobot. "Around the middle of February, I started to notice this organism called Dinophysis," she said, which she knew was toxic, but which had never before bloomed in the Gulf. "I'm wondering, 'Should there be this many?' I started seeing more. One day, I really see a lot, and I'm thinking, 'This is crazy. I don't want to cry wolf, but I should probably tell someone.'" Subsequent tests confirmed the presence of actionable levels of the Dinophysis toxin, okadaic acid, in the water and in local shellfish, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to close local shellfish beds and recall shellfish harvested in the first week of March. "Nobody was looking for this type of toxic bloom. It's not part of the ordinary monitoring," Sosik said. "We can't be sure that people would have gotten sick, but there was plenty of toxin in shellfish from that area." Even if official tests had been looking for Dinophysis, they might have missed it, Campbell pointed out, because the populations varied by as much as 10 times at different times of day, perhaps because of tides or swimming patterns of the algae. "Normal routine monitoring might be once a month," Campbell said. "Even if you go twice a month, you might not get it at the right time." Because of the large amount of data collected by the instrument, the researchers can now go back and try to understand why Dinophysis bloomed when it did, and they will continue to look for the usual suspect, Karenia brevis. Related Links: Discovery News blog: What the Tech? Discovery News blog: Earth Impacts |
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