More on water and cyanobacteria

Interview with Susie Wood (13 minute read)

When I interviewed Susie Wood about her work on toxic cyanobacteria, we also had a wider discussion. We spoke about her research, the state of New Zealand’s waterways and what might happen under climate change. I also asked about her favourite type of cyanobacteria. I imagine that’s not a question she gets asked often. In response, she sent me a very cool photo from Antarctica. I promise, the photograph is not lasagne.

Me: when did you first become interested in science?

Susie Wood: When I was growing up my family spent a lot of our holidays camping and doing the Great Walks and being out in the environment. I developed a love for being in the outdoors and New Zealand environment. I had a general interest in biology through school and once I got to university, I followed the things that I was really interested in which turned out to be biology and environmental science. You tend to do well at the things that you enjoy.

Me: when did you first hear about cyanobacteria?

Susie Wood: I did a science degree at Victoria University, then an honours. As part of my honours project, I was looking at the effect of toxic compounds on freshwater organisms. We’d been in touch with some researchers in Europe and they suggested I look at the impact of the toxins produced by the cyanobacteria on these organisms. I read up on what we knew about the toxins in New Zealand and discovered that really no one had ever tested any of our lakes or rivers for these toxins. There was this huge knowledge gap and that aligned right with when I was starting my PhD. So my PhD became the first survey of our lakes looking at what cyanobacteria were there and working out which ones produced toxins. Then I went further to look at whether they accumulated in some of our freshwater organisms and the health risks that could arise from that.

Me: can you tell me a little bit more about your career? When did you go to Cawthron?

Susie Wood: When I finished my PhD, I started working at the Cawthron Institute. Cawthron has been a world leader in the field of marine harmful algal blooms for several decades. There’s a lot of commonalities between the freshwater and the marine in terms of the types of analysis we do and how we analyse samples. So it was a neat place for me to come because I could make use of a lot of the chemistry equipment and skills here, and DNA based methods as well.

About a year after that I got a government funded post-doc developing DNA-based techniques for early detection of these cyanobacteria and I’ve been here ever since. At first, our work was on cyanobacteria in lakes, then it shifted more to cyanobacteria in rivers and now I’m back more working on lakes but with a much more holistic focus, not just cyanobacteria but lake health in general.

In 2005 we had a spate of dog deaths at the Hutt River in Lower Hutt. That was the start of a whole lot of work on what we call the benthic cyanobacteria, the ones that grow on the bottom of the rivers. We did about 10 or 15 years of work. There had been lots of research on planktonic cyanobacteria, the ones in lakes, but much less on these benthic cyanobacteria.

It’s interesting now, more and more countries around the world are having problems and so it’s cool to see the research that we did being used globally. When the cyanobacteria bloomed in the Hutt River, we thought it was an isolated incident but actually every summer since then we’ve had another river that’s got problems. Often it’s found by a dog that unfortunately eats the cyanobacterial mats.

There’s a much, much better awareness now, with the warning signs and the media releases. Hopefully we’re preventing unnecessary animal deaths.

Me: So a bit of a side question, you mentioned Cawthron being a leader in toxic algal blooms and marine environments, is that cyanobacteria or is that actual algae?

Susie Wood: That is actual algae. We do have marine cyanobacteria, but not that much is known about toxic marine cyanobacteria. Most of the problems that we get, when toxins accumulate in shellfish and people get sick from eating shellfish, are from true algae. Interestingly enough, one of the chemical toxins that is produced by those algae is actually also produced by cyanobacteria. So, it’s very interesting from an evolutionary point of view that this toxin is produced by two very genetically distinct types of organisms.

Me: can you tell me a little bit more about the river cyanobacteria that’s associated with the dog poisoning.