"The water's definitely got something in it, because it's not green. It's red," Davis pointed out as he pulled his boat out on the Courtney Campbell Causeway. "I had probably a hundred pounds of dead crabs today."
Algae blooms cause fish kills by depleting the water of oxygen. Pinellas County watershed manager Kelli Hammer Levy watched the latest bloom in water samples.
"Within a couple of weeks it went from a little to millions. Millions," she recalled. "You look in a microscope and your eyes go, 'oh jeez, where do I begin counting?' "
Nobody knows how long the bloom will last or spread. The last major bloom in 2009 persisted for months and spread out over 14 miles.
"It got bad. I had to move out of this area," Davis remembered. "Everything's dead, you can't crab, you can't catch a product. I had to move out, but hopefully it don't get as bad this time, I really hope not."
Levy said the algae probably never really went away.
"This organism creates a cyst, and that's a problem, because the cyst can live in the sediment for a really, really long time. And then when the conditions are just right -- boom!" Levy explained.
There are no known health effects on humans, although heavy concentrations can bother people with sensitive respiratory systems.
http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/news/local/pinellas/algae-bloom-swarms-through-old-tampa-bay-08262011
