Red tide spawns blue light show at night on San Diego coastline

Los Angeles Times / latimes.com ^ | September 30, 2011 | By Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times

[thecodont]

Find a dark spot on the San Diego County coastline after nightfall and you might be treated to a spectacular neon-blue light show.

Bioluminescent waves, glowing electric blue as they crash ashore, have been dazzling nighttime beach visitors this week. People have been snapping photos of the otherworldly surf as it has increased in intensity over the last few days.

The blue glow is caused by an algae bloom commonly referred to as a red tide. The organisms, phytoplankton called Lingulodinium polyedrum, have bloomed since late August, turning the water brownish-red in the daytime, according to UC San Diego scientists.

The churning of the waves turns the tide a brilliant blue, visible only at night.

It's caused by a chemical reaction on the cellular level, said Peter J. Franks, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor who calls the phytoplankton "my favorite dinoflagellate."

"Why favorite?" Franks wrote in a Q&A posted on the blog Deep-Sea News. "Because it's intensely bioluminescent. When jostled, each organism will give off a flash of blue light created by a chemical reaction within the cell. When billions and billions of cells are jostled — say, by a breaking wave — you get a seriously spectacular flash of light."

[thecodont]

Cool picture at the link.

[muglywump]

We saw (and swam in) this stuff in ‘Bio-Bay’ in Puerto Rico this year. Cool stuff.

[exDemMom]

Nice. When my husband and I were dating, we caught one of these shows off the Monterey coast. It was pretty amazing to watch.

[R. Scott]

We used to walk down to the boardwalk at Virginia Beach to watch the black light surf. It was very common at sea in our wake.

[Ditter]

Doesn’t a red tide kill the fish?

[newzjunkey]

I’d been curious what it looked like after hearing about this on the radio. Nice to see a photo.