Watershed Supervisory Committee Moves Ahead with Plan To Combat Algal Blooms

By BILL BELLEN
COOPERSTOWN

For more than 30 years, the regulatory body of the Watershed Supervisory Committee has overseen the protection of the Otsego Lake watershed—a region that covers parts of the towns of Otsego, Middlefield, and Springfield. In the 1990s, this took the form of the committee organizing and implementing the septic system inspection program for lakeside properties, some of which, until then, had still been discharging sewage directly into the water supply. Though the group’s efforts have long been a success with regard to mitigating this pollution, a new challenge has arisen in the last few years that presents a much more complex conundrum.

The summer of 2022 marked the first major harmful algal bloom—or HAB—in Otsego Lake, resulting in the closure of the public beach at Glimmerglass State Park as well as the Village of Cooperstown-owned Three Mile Point and Fairy Spring parks. Though not to the scale that some New York State counties have seen, the negative effects of HABs on public health have been raising concerns.

Dr. Kiyoko Yokota, associate professor at SUNY Oneonta and scientific advisor to the WSC, shared information regarding the HABs found in Otsego Lake, and addressed public misconceptions regarding them:

“‘Harmful algal bloom’ is a generic name for different kinds of blooms of microscopic photosynthetic organisms, and the one that we are dealing with at Otsego Lake is actually cyanobacterial bloom,” Yokota explained. “It’s caused by prokaryotic cyanobacteria, not eukaryotic algae. Cyanobacteria are a type of bacteria that photosynthesize, but they had been called, erroneously, blue-green algae, so that’s part of the reason that cyanobacterial blooms are still called algal blooms.