Wanted: Green Slime

Lest we get confused – this is not about that kind of green slime.

Or as devotees of bad, cheesily-made horror films may recall, the Green Slime at the heart of a low budget Japanese sci-fi flick of the 60s. In it, astronauts land on a giant asteroid and are successful in halting its collision with Earth. One of them, however, unwittingly carries back to the space station a gooey green substance that soon mutates into one-eyed tentacled monsters that feed off electricity, after which they quite indiscriminately and efficiently zap everyone with a lethal dose of it.  Amping things up in the ensuing battle is not just that jolts from the astronaut’s lazer weaponry actually feed the monsters but that a mere drop of the aliens’ blood can morph into a new, terrifying comrade.

Obviously this is not what the Friends of Casco Bay had in mind when, as reported in Working Waterfront last month, they created the poster “Wanted: Green Slime Sightings.” Worried over a potential invasion, not of alien monsters but the seemingly more benign manifestation of nitrogen pollution, theirs was a call not to arms but for volunteers willing to report on sightings of the offending green stuff. (No doubt such a sign would’ve played a little differently in infamous Roswell, New Mexico, home to the International UFO Museum and a local Arby’s and Wal-Mart that have been known to advertise “Aliens Welcome.”)  

Turns out the kind of green slime the folks in Maine need to be worried about does possess its own deadly zapping capabilities, albeit of a much slower and less violent type. More than just a not so flattering name for a biological complex of algae, our green slime, when it covers a mudflat, suffocates anything beneath it. Bad news if you’re a clam or marine worm. Also for migrating shorebirds whose transcontinental flights often require a stop-off at a bountiful bivalve buffet. Green slime also outcompetes and displaces rockweed, important nurseries for spawning fish.

Since it thrives on nitrogen, green slime’s presence also indicates a potential environmental problem that if unchecked can create oxygen-starved coastal waters and fish kills similar to midcoast Maine’s olfactory-challenging pogie die-off in 1989. The most likely cause-inducing culprits behind green slime are fertilizer-laden water run-off from treated lawns and fields after heavy rains. Also included in this hit list are sewage treatments plants and septic systems as well as particles from car exhaust and smokestack emissions, even fish farms that release nutrients into surrounding waters.

Joe Payne, baykeeper of Casco Bay, is quick to assure us that in Maine a full blown problem with green slime “isn’t here yet, but is knocking on our doors.” However, before double-bolting ourselves inside against the threat of invasion, it’s important to note that we’re already living with an abundance of similar algae – red tides. Yes, those red tides. The ones that this past summer seemed almost routinely to heap havoc all up and down the state’s coastline, often in places where they’d never been before.

And they didn’t wait long to show up. As reported in the Working Waterfront, the more nitrogen in the water, the earlier red tides appear and the longer they last. This year, Maine’s first red tide showed up earlier than ever before. Theories abound on why this was so. Many cite heavy rains followed by abnormally warm temperatures in spring that stuck around into early summer. In other words, good growing conditions for most things.  But the massive “bloom” behind red tide invasion is of a marine phytoplankton, some microscopic plant-like cells that produce chemical toxins. Which certainly sounds like an innocuous enough seeming way for such a potentially harmful invader to get through the door. And it’s also just another example of what most of us don’t know about red tides.

For example, they don’t necessarily have to be red. At least not red in the really red way of the recent sludge disaster in Hungary. There, a storage pond at an alumina plant burst its banks allowing the escape of a highly caustic red sludge that not only killed and chemically burned people but wiped out all the fish in Marcal River. Officials have since said there’s little hope that some of the 2,000 acres flooded by the sludge could ever be made habitable again. That is scary, folks. Way more than green slime tentacled monsters.  

What we’re more likely to know is that imbibing shellfish from red-tide-infested mudflats is a no-no, even if we don’t know the particulars of paralytic shellfish poisoning or have no idea that a red tide bloom has in fact invaded the flats until the price of our basket of fried clams shoots up or we come upon a posted warning on one of our favorite shoreline walks, likely the very place where the livelihood of more than one clammer depends.

Of course there are distinctions between green slime and red tide. But common causes behind their origins likely exist. And outcomes, it seems, are similar. Green slime kills things off. Red tide poisons them.

Fortunately, along with whatever conditions brought on red tides so frequently and early, with major spikes in June and July, the summer’s good news was that conditions also kept red tides from sticking around. According to the Bangor Daily News, it may be that Arctic melting due to climate change altered red tide trends, at least in Maine, as more than usual amounts of fresh water flowed our way from the North via the Labrador Current. Also, and out of our hands completely, were the prevailing winds. This year, fewer North east winds blew the potential red tide brew towards the coasts.

So we dodged a bullet there, and green slime, we’re told, is only just knocking on our door. But it’s probably safe to assume that neither of these scary invaders will cease posing threats. How we arm ourselves is, in many ways, up to us. Baykeeper Payne, certainly no friend to Scott’s, advises lawn-loving homeowners to ease up on Weed and Feed. Others advocate for upgrades to sewage plants or are urging DEP for quicker follow through on establishing nitrogen criteria as required by a state bill passed back in 2007.

Meanwhile, some who look to educate at any age are taking a, well, warm-fuzzy approach. With green slime, it’s fairly easy to evoke evil or, at the very least, some pretty disgusting images suitable to upcoming Halloween. Red tide has a harder time of it. I can pretty safely say no sci-fi about red tide has yet to exist. I’m not sure though in the wisdom of going for the opposite side of the spectrum, to (literally) the soft sell of what appear to be Beanie-Baby-wannabes. But they’re here. And just in time for Christmas.