Several views are required to count all the plates and study their arrangement. Consequently, researchers have been developing techniques to identify Pfiesteria based on its molecular characteristics. Parke A. Rublee of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is working on a fluorescent probe to recognize Pfiesteria. He and his colleagues have found eight ribosomal DNA regions that seem to be unique to Pfiesteria. The researchers are currently testing their approach on samples from the recent Chesapeake fish kills.
Green films are cyanobacteria.
The effects rattle the food chain. In 1985, the first known brown tide appeared off Long Island, N.Y., and destroyed the local bay scallops industry. That bloom has destroyed the beds of seagrass that act as a nursery for fish larvae. Although brown tides kill by a different means than other algal blooms, researchers suspect that they are also linked to an increased flush of nutrients into coastal waters. In the October Global Change Biology, Julie LaRoche and her colleagues from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., describe 11 years of monitoring the ebb and flow of brown tides around Long Island.