Canadian cities along Great Lakes at risk for algae blooms that shut down Toledo's water

It appears that Canadians may have dodged a slimy green bullet in the form of toxic algae blooms that infested Lake Erie this month, but we may not get so lucky next time.

Researchers are warning that with the hot weather around for the rest of August and September, the potential for other outbreaks of the green menace in Canada’s water system may just be a matter of time.

Hundreds of thousands of residents around the Great Lakes region in Ohio and Michigan had a tap water ban put in place last week – particularly hitting the city of Toledo hard. The rising algae blooms had inundated the lake around the municipal water intakes, contaminating the drinking water supply with toxins.

And while the ban was eventually lifted, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a satellite snapshot of the true extent of the bloom, showing the green slime concentrating around the shallower shorelines where perfect conditions exist for the blooms to flourish.

The problem really starts when these massive blooms of these tiny plant-like organisms die off en mass. As they decompose, the oxygen in the water gets consumed, and the dying algae cells release all kinds of deadly toxins that affect both the nervous and respiratory systems of all living things, including fish, amphibians, birds and mammals.

These toxic conditions has aquatic wildlife gasping for air at the water's surface, since all the oxygen has been sucked out of the lakes. And humans that may accidentally drink the water can experience symptoms ranging from abdominal cramps, diarrhea and vomiting.

But while these blooms can be devastating to the aquatic systems, certain kinds of algae are completely natural and represent the foundation on which entire pyramids of food chains are built. However, even when normally beneficial algae get heavy and multiply to form huge tracts of green scum, it can really knock entire ecosystems off kilter.

And even the largest mammals – like endangered manatees in Florida – can be hit hard by these algae blooms. Out of an estimated population of 5,000 manatees, some 240 have died from toxic algae infesting Florida this year.

Meanwhile, the massive, out-of-control blooms we are seeing now in Lake Erie are nothing new and go back to the 1970s. The main culprit has always appeared to be the increasing use of phosphorous used in farming regions around the Great Lakes basin.

While phosphorous has been great in increasing our agricultural output, particularly with the ever-popular corn crop, it gets continually washed into our lakes.

And it appears the same kind of runoff is happening with everything from lawn fertilizers to septic systems and even golf courses. Compounding the problem is the fact that Lake Errie is the shallowest of all the Great Lakes, and that climate change is creating more extreme and wild weather that produce intense, sudden runoffs like never before.

The result we are seeing is that as the lakes get loaded up with more and more phosphorous over the course of the summer, and as both air and water temperatures rise, we get the perfect storm for algae to bloom.

The problem is not going to go away anytime soon.