Annual 'State of The Bays' Presentation At Stony Brook Southampton Wednesday

Stony Brook University marine biologist Dr. Christopher Gobler will give his annual “State of The Bays” presentation on Wednesday night, April 6, recapping the environmental conditions in waters around Long Island and the East End over the past year.

“State of The Bays” will return to an in-person presentation for the first time in two years, on the Stony Brook Southampton campus. The event will be hosted in Duke Lecture Hall at 7:30 p.m., with a student poster presentation and refreshments beforehand at 7 p.m.

Gobler’s talk this year will spotlight the dark news that the number of different species of harmful algae that are now blooming in Long Island waters expanded in 2021 from six to eight.

As the head of the Stony Brook scientific team that has led the effort to trace the rise of toxic and destructive algae blooms that have plagued local bays since the late 1980s, Gobler’s annual research traces the evolution of the blooms and the factors that contribute to their continued annual onslaughts.

“Human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment and 2021 provided the clearest evidence to date that climate change has arrived,” Gobler said in the preamble to his talk. “Locally, outbreaks of novel, invasive and toxic seaweed blooms, joined brown tides, rust tides, toxic cynobacterial blooms, noctural hypoxia, acidification and fish kills as ecosystem impairments directly and indirectly linked to excessive nitrogen loading. In good news, Long Island has become a wellspring for novel solutions to mitigate water quality impairment and climate change. [In-water] approaches involving seaweeds and bivalves can mitigate nitrogen loads, algal blooms and ocean acidification. The New York State Center For Clean Water Technology at Stony Brook University has identified cost-effective technologies to dramatically reduce nitrogen loads from individual homes.”