CNH2-L: Spoiling fish as food: feedbacks between ecosystem and human responses to harmful algal blooms

Around the world, increases in the number, duration, and intensity of cyanobacteria-producing harmful algal blooms (cyanoHABs) threaten both people and ecosystems. Toxins produced by these blooms are likely to impact communities that rely on fisheries for nutrition and livelihoods, particularly through poorly-understood feedbacks between human well-being and aquatic ecosystem dynamics.

The investigators will conduct integrated socioenvironmental research with local collaborators to will fill this knowledge gap by analyzing how cyanoHABs affect fish, fishers, and fish consumers. The project will generate insights that will be relevant to many food systems facing environmental change. The project is led by an early career investigator and will be conducted in close collaboration with local partners.

It will develop socio-environmental research capacity by supporting trainee opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as a postdoctoral researcher, and developing interactive museum exhibits for K-12 students.

Complex feedbacks arising from human behavioral responses to environmental degradation will play an increasingly pivotal role in shaping socio-environmental systems. This project focuses on such feedbacks using the socio-environmental system of a large lake where cyanoHABs are besetting the world’s largest lake fishery and the 30 million people it supports.

Anthropogenic nutrient loading is driving cyanoHABs, which produce a toxin that accumulates in fish at levels far exceeding guidelines for safe consumption. By altering the base of the food web, cyanoHABs may also reduce the nutritional quality of fish. Fishers, consumers, and markets are expected to respond to growing awareness of cyanoHABs and may also show complex responses to differences among fish species in the balance between beneficial and harmful compounds.

In turn, consumer and market responses are likely to feed back upon the aquatic food web, spatiotemporal dynamics of cyanoHABs, and disparities in human health and wellbeing. This project will analyze how cyanoHABs affect toxins and omega-3 fatty acids in fish from across the food web; evaluate market, fisher, and consumer responses to cyanoHABs; and assess how human activities drive spatiotemporal variation in cyanoHABs.

By integrating these findings within a dynamic model, the investigators will test how cyanoHABs alter the distribution of human health risks across resource-dependent populations and provide a framework for evaluating plausible policy levers. By connecting cyanoHAB dynamics with human nutrition and socioeconomic disparities in health risks, they will expand socio-environmental systems theory to address outcomes of natural resource exploitation for human health and equity.

Documenting both the accumulation of cyanoHAB toxins in fish and human responses to this emerging threat will guide development of tools for environmental and public health agencies to manage risks to human health and wellbeing.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.