Harmful algal blooms in western Canadian coastal waters
نویسنده
چکیده
British Columbia (B.C.), the Pacific province of Canada, has one of the longest documented histories of the severest form of harmful algal blooms, paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), along its entire 27,000 km coastline. The first documented case was in 1793 when four of Capt. George Vancouver’s survey crew became ill after a meal of mussels while charting the central coast (Mussel Inlet, originally named Mussel Canal, a side-arm of Mathieson Channel; see Fig. 23). The location where they had the toxic breakfast of mussels was named Poison Cove by Vancouver. One of them died five and a half hours later and the location of his burial was named Carter’s Bay. Their symptoms, described in detail by Vancouver (1798, quoted by Quayle 1969), are unmistakably characteristic of PSP. Earlier illnesses from the consumption of mussels in Europe differ in detail from classic PSP, most notably in the struggle to breath before the cessation of respiration. In PSP breathing stops gradually without struggle (Taylor 1992). In 1799, only a few years after the Capt. Vancouver incident, a major poisoning episode with many fatalities involving Aleut Indians working with Alexander Baranoff in the RussianAmerican sea-otter fur trade occurred in nearby southern Alaska (detailed by Trainer, this volume).
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