What does the first-known detection of an algal toxin in Alaska’s marine mammals mean for food security in the North?

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In the spring of 1998, 70 sea lions showed up on California’s central coast with a mysterious illness. The animals, adults and youngsters alike, were vomiting and having seizures. At the time, the primary suspect was mercury poisoning, but Kathi Lefebvre, then a first-year PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suspected something else. Lefebvre remembered reading about a cluster of people in Canada who, in the late 1980s, showed similar symptoms after eating blue mussels harvested from Prince Edward Island that were contaminated with domoic acid, a neurotoxin produced by certain algae. Those people had been afflicted with amnesic shellfish poisoning,and she thought the sea lions might be suffering the same fate.

Lefebvre grabbed a cooler, blew off her biochemistry class, and headed north to the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, where the sick and dead sea lions had been transported. She collected as many samples as she could get her hands on.

“I got liver, kidney, muscle, blubber, feces, urine, all this stuff, and spent days and days and days by myself in the lab,” she says. After molecularly analyzing the samples and peering at them through a microscope, she found domoic acid and evidence of the type of algae that produces it (in the Pseudo-nitzschia genus) in the sea lions’ feces. This was the first time that domoic acid poisoning had been found in marine mammals.

Eighteen years