In today’s edition of The World is Trying to Kill Us, growing blooms of algae are poisoning sea lions off the coast of California, leading to more aggressive interactions with humans along the beaches, including an incident where a child reported being bitten in the leg while wading in the surf, NBC News reports.
The algae, Pseudo-nitzschia, gets eaten by fish who digest it, creating a neurotoxin called domoic acid, which then gets ingested by the sea lions higher on the food chain. In sea lions, domoic acid accumulates and starts poisoning them, impacting their neurological system and turning the normally non-aggressive into an aquatic Real Housewives. “It literally affects their brains, and the behavior of sea lions — especially when the concentrations of domoic acid are quite high — is drastically changed,” John Warner, CEO of Los Angeles non-profit Marine Mammal Care Center, said. “They become symptomatic in ways that are just unpredictable in terms of their behavior, aggressiveness that we don’t normally see.”