To any area resident with even a passing interest in the health of the marine environment, it is a horrible sight to behold: dozens of dead or paralyzed gulls huddle along the beaches of Lake Erie, their muscles frozen by disease. Wave after wave of lifeless fish crash into the shore, the scaly husks numbering in the hundreds. Thousands of mud puppies fall dead in a period of days, an event shocking its suddenness.
 
Something is rotten in Lake Erie, and a team of researchers from the State University of New York at Fredonia is using funds from a pair of federal grants to get to the bottom of this problem.
 
Dr. Alicia Perez-Fuentetaja and Dr. Theodore Lee, assistant professors in biology at SUNY Fredonia, have combined forces with Mark Clapsadl of the Chautauqua-Erie Environmental Center and William Culligan and Donald Einhouse of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to study the lake's mysterious new killer: Type E botulism. With $37,000 from the federal Fish and Wildlife Restoration Act and $50,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency's Great Lakes National Program, the group has initiated a research project which may help answer why botulism has inflated the lake's death tolls for the past four years. The two-year study of lake sediment - "Botulism Type E in Lake Erie: Ecology and Lower Food Web Transfer" - also puts SUNY Fredonia at the forefront of environmental botulism research.
 
"Last fall, I started talking to Sea Grant (a state marine research agency) and the DEC about (the outbreaks)," Dr. Perez-Fuentetaja said. "There was a lot interest in somebody studying what was going on in Lake Erie, (but) I was the only person who was really jumping towards the problem. Up until now, the last two or three years, people were talking about (botulism), but there was no action. With the problem becoming more visible - Congress has even expressed their interest - you're going to see a lot more people moving into the field."
 
Dr. Perez-Fuentetaja and her team, which also includes SUNY Fredonia graduate student Dan Sek, have been taking samples of the lake floor off the coasts of Van Buren and Dunkirk's Cedar Beach since June. The group hopes to discover the clues that lead to answers regarding the frustrating questions on the sources of botulism in the Lake Erie ecosystem. SUNY Fredonia also hosted a botulism seminar for a wide collection of researchers, politicians and sportsmen this past May.
 
"I saw a lot of potential for the college to shine," Dr. Perez-Fuentetaja said. "This is a pathogen that is causing trouble and social unrest - people are worried."
 
Part of the reason for the concern is the fact that the Lake Erie botulism outbreaks, which began in earnest in 1999, do not seem to follow previously understood patterns of the bacteria. Although Type E botulism, according to researchers for Cornell University, can be found in Canadian lakes and within the gills of fish taken from these bodies of water, it has been playing some new tricks in Lake Erie which have biologists puzzled.
 
According to the older school of thought, the bacteria that causes botulism - known to scientists as Clostridium botulinum - would be ingested by animals which, in turn, were eaten by fish. These fish would eventually die, although not from Type E botulism; the bacteria that causes the malady did not seem to effect fish. The fish would eventually die on its own, wash ashore and become food for scavengers such as sea gulls. When these waterfowl got their beaks into these decomposing dinners, they were also getting their beaks full of botulism. The bacteria would then kill the bird.
 
This model seemed to make sense in western New York, initially, until researchers noticed that scavenging birds were not the only species suffering the unfortunate ailments of botulism. A loon or a merganser, for example, will only eat fresh fish, but these birds were turning up dead, as well. In addition, fish kills - massive mass deaths of lake fish -were becoming an all-too-common occurrence. "The fish were dying, too, but no one knew until very recently that fish could actually die from Type E botulism," Culligan said. "What we assumed was occurring, what everyone used to believe, was that these fish kills would occur, the bodies of the fish would wash up on shore and as they would rot, the would develop the bacteria that causes botulism…We came to believe that the fish themselves were actually developing botulism, which explained why birds that only ate fresh fish were dying from the disease, as well. Based on the old theory, it shouldn't have been happening that way."
 
Which, according to Dr. Lee, is where SUNY Fredonia enters the picture. "We usually see Type C botulism in fish and birds," he said. "It's unusual to see Type E…We want to see if it has to do with the habitat." Clostridium botulinum occurs naturally in the environment - that is not an issue of elevated importance. The question SUNY Fredonia's research team wants to answer is why Type E botulism has taken such a shining to Lake Erie and its aquatic life. "This bacteria is ubiquitous. It's everywhere," Dr. Perez-Fuentetaja said. "Type E, however, is something that happens very, very rarely, yet this is the fourth year in a row we are having it at this location. There are no reports of ever having it before. We think that something has changed in the lake that is creating the right conditions for this bacteria to exist." The Fredonia team believes that change in the eastern basin of the lake - most likely from the influx of mussels - have created the oxygen-free, nutrient-rich sediment on the lake's bottom that fosters the growth of Clostridium bacteria and the Type E strain. "Organisms like fish that may be eating something from the sediment, or zebra mussels are filtering water across the sedimental zone," Dr. Perez-Fuentetaja explained. "We hypothesize that somehow, they come into contact with the bacteria and the toxin. Whenever they die, the bacteria grows in their bodies and it gets passed onto something else as part of the food web."
 
Dr. Lee will perform Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests for all strains of botulism on samples taken from the lake in hopes of proving this hypothesis and, eventually, help protect against possible outbreaks.
 
In 2000, when environmentalists first began to suspect botulism as the culprit behind the mass wildlife deaths, investigation was stymied by the priority given to the West Nile virus. Now, two years later, botulism is becoming a hotter topic, and SUNY Fredonia is helping to lead the charge. "There are three major things right now with botulism research," Culligan said. "Through the DEC, Ward Stone, a wildlife pathologist at Delmar, was the first to diagnosis botulism in fish, and he is still being sent hundreds, if not thousands of specimens to examine. So he is working on some of these questions steadily. "Cornell received a grant which allowed it to perform routine fish studies in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This will allow them to look both at healthy and dying fish. They are trying to see whether there is some environmental stress that makes them more susceptible to botulism.
 
"And then there is SUNY Fredonia, which looks at zebra mussels, invertebrates and bottom sediments. They look at the environmental conditions that make a die-off more likely to occur."
 
Which puts this small state university on the shores of Lake Erie at the very top of what is becoming a major international environmental issue. "There are no other groups doing the type of research we are doing right now," Dr. Perez-Fuentetaja concluded. "We are right at the forefront of this."