All hands on deck to understand, predict, prevent abrupt ecological change

In 2011, Lake Erie turned into a toxic pea soup. One-sixth of the lake harbored a thick and deadly algal bloom that killed fish, closed beaches and struck a blow to Toledo, Ohio's tourism industry. The bloom was three times larger than any algal bloom ever recorded there. Then, in 2014, toxic algae suddenly contaminated Toledo's water supply, preventing half a million people from consuming, cooking or bathing with their tap water. Stephen Carpenter, shown in Lake Mendota, has conducted experiments to understand what drives algal blooms and similar disruptive environmental shifts. Photo: Jeff Miller The contamination was forecast by ecologists in 2011, said Stephen Carpenter, newly retired as director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology, at a recent campus symposium centered around a new effort to understand, predict and prevent these kinds of abrupt ecological changes. That's because increased agricultural runoff - which dumps nutrients that support algae, like phosphorous, into lakes - has combined with climate change (warmer waters) in recent years to produce blooms that are larger, more frequent and possibly more harmful.