Algae damaging sea lions'brains

摘要

Algal red tides can have some odd effects on marine creatures -causing sea lions to stray into pools and parking lots, for instance. Now high-tech medical equipment is offering a peek inside the animals' skulls to discover what causes such bizarre behaviour. Eric Montie of the University ofSouth FloridainStPetersburg studied wild sea lions, including some that showed symptoms of poisoning by domoic acid - the neurotoxin secreted by the algae. He placed anaesthetised sea lions in an MRI scanner to image their brains, and found that the hippocampus of sick animals was half the size of that in healthy ones. The hippocampus controls -an animal's spatial awareness, which could explain why poisoned sea lions often get lost.