Tag Archives: PSP

On This Week’s Alaska Fisheries Report with Terry Haines: The Deadliest Dinoflagellates

Crew digs for clams on Mission beach. (Photo by Kayla Desroches / KMXT) Kayla Desroches/KMXT Kodiak tribal organizations are looking at how many clams are nestled in local beaches. Shellfish are a popular subsistence food on the island, and the Sun’aq Tribe, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, and the Kodiak Area Native Association are surveying the density of the local …

Joan Barnowsky with PSP presentation in Anchorage. Photo courtesy of Bobbi Barnowsky Kayla Desroches/KMXT A couple of Old Harbor students recently won recognition for their scientific experiments, one which tests for PSP. In late March, the 62nd  Alaska Science & Engineering Fair in Anchorage brought in over 200 submissions.  Among them were Ruby Taylor’s examination of the process of extracting …

On this week’s Talk of the Rock, host Kayla Desroches talks with Alaska Sea Grant’s Julie Matweyou and the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association’s Bruce Wright about the development of a test kit to monitor for paralytic shellfish poisoning.

Kayla Desroches/KMXT Researchers are developing a field test kit that would make it easier to monitor for paralytic shellfish poisoning. Project partners include NOAA researchers from the lower 48 as well as community testers based on Kodiak Island and in the Alaska Peninsula. Despite the high level of toxicity found in shellfish in the Kodiak Archipelago, people still harvest them. …

Steamed butter clams. Yu Morita / Flickr Kayla Desroches/KMXT A person recently fell ill with parasitic shellfish poisoning after consuming butter clams from Roslyn beach in the Chiniak area. Julie Matweyou, Kodiak agent with the Alaska Seagrant Marine Advisory Program, says the incident was nonfatal, but the clam samples came back with an extremely high level of toxin. “Just to …