Red tide forum highlights need for best management practices

VENICE — Scientists speaking at a red tide forum hosted Wednesday by the city of Venice Environmental Advisory Board stressed there’s no magic bullet to combat the bloom and offered sometimes conflicting opinions about human impacts on the phenomenon.

Ron Musselman, a professor emeritus at Franklin & Marshall College, characterized it as an “ocean physics problem” that is not significantly impacted by pollution runoff.

Instead, he noted that in an algae bloom the organism splits every three days and is influenced by the complex eddy flow of the Gulf of Mexico.