Mystery of Alaskan ‘Goo’ Rust Solved at Last
Last fall the small Alaskan coastal village of Kivalina was inundated by a mysterious orange “goo”(click for photo). Locals and others suspected a toxic algal bloom (see here for image), or perhaps some sort of chemical release, or millions of microscopic “crustacean eggs”.
Yet just a month later the mystery substance was identified as none other than a plant-parasitic fungus called a rust — completely harmless to humans and aquatic life, and probably not bad plankton food. I covered this at length in my follow-up post. But the mystery remained: what plant disease epidemic had this rust come from? And to produce a bloom of spores that huge, how could no one have noticed?
Now, the identity of the rust has been revealed at last. It is the Spruce-Labrador Tea Needle Rust, Chrysomyxa ledicola, a parasite of both spruce trees and a rhododendron — a flowering woody shrub common to conifer understories the world over — called Labrador Tea. I had never heard of a rhododendron you could drink, but my old friend, mycologist, and ex-pat Canadian Kathie Hodge at Cornell assured me it makes quite a delicious tea. Apparently, C. ledicola agrees with her Labrador -Tea deliciousness assessment.