On Thursday morning all was right with the Lagoon Pond. The water was clear, blue-green crystal, by all appearances the very picture of estuarine health. Just a day before, the water was clouded by an unsightly yellowish-brown fog from the head to the mouth of the Lagoon. It was an explosion of prorocentrum, an algae, and the largest one that Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group director Rick Karney has ever seen.
Algal blooms
2011
2008
September 1, 2008
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.
August 28, 2008
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.
