The Chilmark Pond Foundation received approvals last week to place an ultrasonic buoy in the pond in an effort to beat back cyanobacteria blooms from forming.
Its scientific name is Codium fragile, but for many beachcombers across the Island the invasive macroalgae goes by a more ominous title: dead man’s fingers.
A person who went crabbing in Chilmark Pond was sickened by what appears to be a neurotoxin from blue/green algae blooms in the water, according to Chilmark health officials.
It’s been bad news for shellfishing on Martha’s Vineyard and beyond in recent days, from a state-ordered closure to the discovery last week of a heavy algae bloom in the Tisbury Great Pond.
A dozen volunteers gathered at the Lagoon Pond last Saturday morning to do something no one could recall being done on the Vineyard. They came to harvest floating mats of algae in Mud Creek in Vineyard Haven. It was both an experiment and a beginning for an expanding effort to manage and improve the water quality in coastal ponds.
It’s not July, but it seems like July. It used to be that some things that happen only began to happen in mid-summer, but not this year, no sir. Things are happening now. We can remember when the masses were blooming in the seventh month of the year, while this year, in the fifth month, they are congregating. From the Skiff avenue end of Lagoon Pond they have arrived — massive influxes of what appear to be brown clouds of death. The algae blooms are here.
The algal bloom in Edgartown Great Pond has prompted much well-justified discussion and concern.The following is intended to provide a little additional detail on prospective solutions to improve the health of the pond.
Were it not for the smell, you might mistake the light, fibrous, grayish stuff in Bob Woodruff’s shed for the material they make egg cartons from.
But the low-tide aroma is the giveaway. What we have here is dried slime. Or, more correctly, dried algae of the species Enteromorpha clathrata, which this summer grew in unprecedented profusion over much of the Edgartown Great Pond.
Experts are mystified by the bloom of an unknown type of algae this summer on the Edgartown Great Pond that has covered acres of the pond’s surface, choking out light to eelgrass beds and then sinking onto shellfish beds.
A sample of the algae was sent this week to the Smithsonian Institution after attempts to positively identify it through records at the Polly Hill Arboretum and through the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution were inconclusive.
