β-Methylamino-L-alanine

If you and your pod are going somewhere and you can't hear them, not helpful.

So yeah, this study is the strongest evidence yet that a chronic exposure to cyanobacterial toxins such as BMAA and DAB can lead to neurodegenerative disease in wild mammals, and probably also us.

It demonstrates that dolphins' navigation errors and strandings might be from this cognitive decline.

And it's showing the bioindicators that toxal algal blooms are changing brain chemistry of marine mammals.

So the direct edibility of Azolla for humans is contested.

Um, it is established for producing protein-rich feed for animals, but the presence of, uh, potentially contaminating unnatural amino acids, uh, there's one particular called BMAA, uh, which is linked to neurodegeneration.

Um, there's a host of other anti-nutritive compounds that are present that limit its direct use as human food.

So, you know, you can feed Azolla to animals, and that's one simple pathway for protein production.

True, and there are a lot of different flavors of cyanobacteria out there.

What we're learning about a handful of them is that in addition to producing a neurotoxin, uh, which is called beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA, in addition to producing this neurotoxin that is indeed released into water, it appears that the neurotoxin itself is probably airborne.

And so folks who live on the perimeter of these lakes, the perimeter of this brackish water, may also be exposed to aerosols containing BMAA.

And this is dangerous because heck of a lot of lab studies have shown relationships between BMAA exposure, both oral and through the nose, right, nasal, have these relationships with excitotoxicity, cell death, neurodegeneration.

BMAA exposure is, you know, one of the primary causal predictors of rates of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, motor neuron disease.

It's been implicated in the development of things like Parkinsonism, Alzheimer's.

And the real dangerous thing here, uh, when it comes to a changing climate is that, uh, these blooms are increasing in size and frequency as a function of climate change, right? What do they need to survive? They need sunlight.