California Sea Grant College Program

  We are interested in testing a new methodology called Solid Phase AbsorptionToxin Tracking (SPATT), which is a man-made resin that passively captures algal toxins in water; it can be thought of as a man-made, passive, sentinel “mussel”.This technology was developed in New Zealand (MacKenzie et al. 2004), and is inlimited use in the UK (Turrell et al., 2007) and Australia (Takahashi et al.,2007), but has not yet been tested in the US. Our hypothesis was that this resin, deployed using the same methodology as described by others (outside the US), would passively capture domoic acid, providing an integrated time-series of toxin levels in the coastal ocean.