red tide and phosphorescence

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alaity47

Contributor
Scuba Instructor
Messages
310
Reaction score
1
Location
Glendale, CA
# of dives
200 - 499
Where is the red tide still doing the glow-y thing at night? I hear it's now gone north of Venice... is it still visible down around Huntington/Laguna? Might be worth a field trip out there (I live in Glendale!)
 
One of my co-workers who lives in Redondo took her kids down to the beach with a bucket last evening to collect some dinoflagellates. They took it home and had a good time sloshing the bucket around and watching the bioluminescence trigger. By this morning, though, most of the critters were dead.

From the reports I've seen, the red tide moves a little offshore and then back in, a little up or down the coast, etc. Overall it seems to still very much be around, but as to specifically which beach you'll find it at at a given time will just depend on conditions when you go.
 
Last nite we did a "dive" (or tried to) at Redondo. It was wild.... the phosphorescence appeared light blue but was wicked bright... you could almost read a gauge by it. Problem was every time you moved your head, your head was surrounded in this blue glow, making it very hard to see anything beyond the glow.

Forget the bottle tho :(
 
Living on Catalina where fresh water is scarce, we use salt water toilets and are often able to see the bioluminescence of the dinoflagellates when we flush the toilet with the lights off. I hear the red tide along the mainland has a new species of dinoflagellate (a Ceratium I believe) which may be even brighter than our regular species.

When I'm on board the Lindblad cruise ships, I give a brief lecture on the "green flush" (versus the solar green flash) since the ship's toilets are also salt water. it gets a laugh out of the passengers, and many come up to me at breakfast the next day to say they saw it!

Dr. Bill
 

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