Interested if anyone has thoughts on possible encoding of this story, which given its location in the heart of meta-verse territory seems significant. Someone who lives nearby sent it to me. I’m thinking of how this may relate to recent developments around water access, dead pools, etc.
Lake Merritt is a lake in Oakland that is open to the ocean, so brackish with a really complex ecosystem. There was a bloom of heterosigma algae that killed off most of the fish in the lake and other life forms.
As I read this I’m thinking these events will advance shift to syn-bio “fertilizer” as I suspect the transition out of nitrogen-based fertilizers is underway (not that I’m a fan of that model). I think this will be turned into an impact market - @leo you mentioned insurance, fertilizer, and seeds are often sold -pre-packaged and in that way with the World Food Programme they can create the datasets they need to fulfill the deals.
It seems this algae has bio-luminscent properties and can cause death of fish by gill damage - hypoxia.
It also seems to me that this might relate to population growth modeling with mathematical implications - complexity theory, etc.
Also @leo the algae is mentioned in this recent ecosystem services paper focused on a Chilean island.
Oh, look. A plug for citizen science, too @leo. "
" Another thing anyone can do to help is to document living and dead organisms you might see around the lake on the iNaturalist.org app. This crowdsourced website helps researchers pinpoint where different species are turning up."
Oldest wildlife refuge 1870.