Toxic blooms of cyanobacteria in Lake Alexandrina, South Australia — Learning from history

Abstract

Early accounts by European explorers and settlers of South Australia contain numerous references to scums or discoloured water that are consistent with cyanobacterial blooms. Documented reports refer back to at least 1853. The first detailed scientific account of toxic cyanobacteria appeared in 1878. In a perceptive and prescient paper in Nature, the Adelaide assayer and chemist George Francis reported on stock deaths at Milang on the shores of Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. Francis attributed the deaths to the ingestion and toxicity of scums of the cyanobacterium Nodularia spumigena. Reports of cyanobacterial blooms, scums and associated problems in Lake Alexandrina and in the River Murray between about 1851 and 1888 are discussed and comparisons are made with the reactions to blooms a century later.