Monitoring program halted, despite bloom risk
The agency charged with monitoring the health of Queensland’s waterways has canceled its long-running toxic algae monitoring program in Moreton Bay, removing a key warning the state could have received about a bloom similar to the one seen in South Australia.
The decision comes just months after the same agency warned that there was an increased risk of devastating algae blooms in the bay.
Lyngbya algae caused damage in the bay in the late ’90s and early 2000s; It choked seagrass meadows and drove away fish and other marine life.
The algae has spread in huge sheets that can double in size every five days, especially at the southern mouth of the Pumice Passage, the wide expanse of sandy water between Bribie Island and the mainland.
When the waters receded, it washed up in large piles of festering mud on the area’s beaches, where heavy machinery was used to remove it.
Fisherman Greg Savige’s eyes burned as he scraped dried seaweed from his nets and saw the marks that turned into scars on the legs of fishermen who touched the nets.
Most importantly, he felt its impact on the industry that had once thrived around him.
“This went on for many years. Most of the net fishermen either moved away or did something else,” Savige said after a morning of fishing last week.
“One year there were over 10,000 tons here on that little shore.”
Savige became the face of flowers, featured in news segments, and provided a link between academics trying to understand him and fishermen trying to cope with him.
As the algae became better understood and eventually became less obvious, Savige began compiling reports on the status of Lyngbya around Deception Bay.
Once a month, when the tide is at its lowest point, Savige gets on his jet ski with his wife, Julie, and heads out to hot spots where algae is known to grow.
Professor Michele Burford, an algae expert from Griffith University who was involved in identifying Lyngbya in the early days, said Savige’s work was vital.
“We can see a great long-term picture that correlates to things like drought periods and flood periods, which you can’t get with a short-term data set,” he said.
But on April 8, Savige received an email from Healthy Land and Water, an organization funded by the state and other stakeholders to monitor environmental health, telling him to stop work.
“The Ecosystem Health Monitoring Program is currently undergoing a broader review [led] The provincial government and its executive committee have decided to pause this component for now, the head of monitoring and research, Wing Tsoi, said in his email.
The email also asked him to send the remaining invoices for the job, for which he was paid $500 a month.
Burford, who sits on the scientific advisory committee on the bloom in South Australia, said monitoring was necessary to manage the risk of further blooms in Moreton Bay.
“It gives you an early warning when there are problems and you start to see blooms emerge before they get too serious,” he said.
A Healthy Soil and Water spokesman said the pause was part of a wider review launched by the environment department to ensure monitoring methods were fit for purpose.
“Current funding constraints mean that resources must be carefully balanced across sample collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting,” they said.
A report prepared by Broadstrokes consultants was submitted to the government in February and the environment ministry was working on the recommendations with stakeholders.
Healthy Land and Water, formerly known as Healthy Waterways, was established in response to Lyngbya outbreaks in the early 2000s and now produces annual report cards for the state’s waterways.
In its latest report card, the body found that the bay was poised for a new major bloom with high levels of sediment and nutrients. Excellent food for Lyngbya and other toxic algae native to the bay.
Savige said that during last summer – when Lyngbya was most likely to grow due to warm water – he began to notice flowers at the mouth of the Caboolture River.
“I was fishing there about two or three weeks ago and I thought, wow, this place is pretty thick,” Savige said.
He believes recent work on the state-backed North Harbor development on the river’s banks could contribute.
Burford said past large increases were likely caused by a combination of runoff from land development, forestry and agriculture, but any development that causes runoff can pose a risk.
North Harbor project director Bryan Finney said the development is taking sediment and nutrient control seriously, and monitoring has shown that water quality around the project has actually improved.
“We support a transparent and open approach to these measures and this is part of our annual reporting to the Commonwealth government under the project’s EPBC. [environmental] approval,” he said.
But a walk through the area this week showed signs of sediment flowing into the drains of newly paved roads; this is not an uncommon sight in green spaces like this.
It is insights like these that Burford fears will be overlooked. Savige only monitors part of the bay, but Lyngbya has bloomed in other areas, including points Victoria and Wellington, and Broadwater on the Gold Coast.
“We really have no idea when blooms appear until they reach large sizes or are close to where people fish,” he said.
“The risk is that we don’t even know what’s there.”
A spokesperson for Healthy Land and Water said the organization was committed to understanding Lyngbya in the bay but could not confirm specific plans for future testing.
The government plans to make the Broadstrokes report public in the coming months.
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