What is disruption of Phytoplankton Balance? - Clean-flo

Why is Phytoplankton Balance important?

The tipping point in eutrophication occurs when sediment nutrient recycling becomes self-sustaining because hypoxia becomes entrenched and the food web can no longer maintain nutrient clearance, leading to a fundamental transformation in the ecosystem.

When this happens, the water body not only loses the balance between vegetative and animal populations necessary to maintain nutrient clearance but the transformation to nutrient recycling also locks in feedback mechanisms that cause the lake to keep worsening its own condition.

What Happens When Phytoplankton Balance is Lost?

The impairment of the food web’s capacity to clear nutrients may not always be apparent through dramatic events like fish kills.
Instead, overt symptoms such as invasive weeds, excessive algae, and eventually toxic cyanobacteria Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) become more noticeable.
Many people fall into the trap of reactively fighting these symptoms using potent chemical herbicides, algaecides, and chemical precipitants to remove phosphorus from the water column.
But, these treatments only exacerbate the problem by creating more organic sediment from decomposing weeds and algae, increasing the sediment nutrient stockpile available for recycling, and accelerating the decline of the ecosystem.
The Government Accountability Report on the failure to manage hypoxia and HABs specifically called out these practices as counterproductive.

Investing in these chemical treatments is essentially paying good money to make your lake worse.

How Can You Tell if Your Phytoplankton is Out of Balance?

While the food web can be assessed at many levels, including fish censuses, these assessments can be expensive.

Phytoplankton and zooplankton, which are foundation levels of the food web, are cheaper and easier to measure and gain insight from.

Collecting phytoplankton and zooplankton samples is relatively simple, and they are sent to a specialized laboratory for professional analysis that details:

Phytoplankton and Zooplankton Taxonomy

This shows the extent to which beneficial algae species that provide good nutrition for the food web are present or have been displaced by toxic cyanobacteria species.

Phytoplankton and Zooplankton Biovolume

This shows how excessive phytoplankton levels have become. When combined with measurements of hypoxia, the eutrophic status of the water body can be easily inferred.

High phytoplankton levels and cyanobacteria predominance provide insight into the eutrophic status of the water body and help forecast its future trajectory.

Because cyanobacteria are poor nutrition for zooplankton, zooplankton numbers decrease as they get starved out and cyanobacteria become more dominant.

How Do You Eliminate Hypoxia?

Knowing hypoxia is the problem is one thing; knowing how to actually get oxygen back to the bottom of your lake is another.

See how true oxygenation (not just “aeration”) restores dissolved oxygen through the whole water column - so you can stop fish kills and nutrient recycling at the source.