As people look for places to cool off and enjoy the summer, there could be something lurking in the water making it dangerous to swim in local lakes and bays.
Harmful algal blooms not only look and smell disgusting but can make you and your pets sick if you come in contact with it. The toxins can also become airborne and cause respiratory problems.
Artificial fertilizers and animal waste cause an excess of nutrients in the water, causing the algae grow, and hotter temperatures make a favorable environment for those blooms to become toxic.
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Climate change may make more of our waterways off limits in the future.
“So we have these inputs into the system, and we have a climate in which the extreme events, the heat waves, the big storms that flush the nutrients into the water are getting worse," Dr. Silvia Secchi, a professor at the University of Iowa said. "So it’s a combination of two kinds of things compounding each other that make a natural phenomenon worse all across the planet.”
Before you go for a dip, we’ve provided resources to check the water quality.
