The 'Windex Blue' Bioluminescent Waves Are Back In SoCal

No tickets to the Beyoncé concert? Can't afford to see Lionel Messi this weekend? Well there's a show happening at the beach and it's free — the bioluminescent blue waves are back.

In recent weeks, they’ve been spotted along the Orange County coast in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, further south in Oceanside and even in the Bay Area. The glowing blue waves are caused by a species of plankton called dinoflagellates, which swim in clusters causing a red tide, but when disturbed, they emit the glittering flashes of light.

Anne Teresa Baker, a mother of four in Lakewood, has spent the decades chasing the “Windex blue” waves. Twenty years ago, she read about the phenomenon in the news and took her children to Seal Beach to see the bioluminescence.

“We were just elated because it was just magical,” she said.

Newport Beach, 2021

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Courtesy Mark Girardeau / Orange County Outdoors

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Laguna Beach, March 2021.

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Courtesy Mark Girardeau / Orange County Outdoors

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How to know it's here

The family spent that summer going to different points of Southern California’s coast looking for the blue waves, or as Baker called it: “Our summer of chasing bioluminescence.”

Since then, she is always looking to rope in a family member to go on a “bio hunt” with her. When she heard that the dinoflaggetas had hit Orange County beaches once again, she headed to Laguna Beach with her husband on Thursday night.

They didn’t find any. Now, she hopes to convince her husband to spend a few hours at the Oceanside beach on Labor Day weekend after a wedding to look for the neon blue waves.

As a mother of four, Baker said, she can’t often go “beachcombing at night” so she relies on social media platforms, like photographer Patrick Coyne’s page, to keep up to date on sightings.

“The best way to predict whether you are gonna see bioluminescence at the beach is to check your social media,” said Drew Lucas, an associate professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Social media, he said, has brought awareness to the bioluminescent red tide that has been documented in Southern California for over 100 years.

How the blue waves form

Lucas and a team of researchers recently published a study that shows these tiny organisms are able to discolor the water and create the shimmering electric blue phenomenon because of their “incredible swimming ability.”

Calling them the “Michael Phelps of the plankton world,” Lucas said the tiny organisms — “smaller than the width of a human hair” — swim to the ocean surface to use sunlight for energy and then swim down to the ocean bed at night to source vital nutrients to grow and reproduce.

This allows the plankton to grow in number giving rise to the blue waves that people love. In 2020, Lucas said his team of researchers measured 1 million cells per millimeter of seawater.

The current levels of bioluminescence in the water is low compared to the 2020 range, he said. What’s happening now is “more in the sort of typical change.”

The late rains, coupled with the high summer temperatures, created a “layered situation in the ocean” where the surface and the deep are separated by a strong temperature change, creating the optimum temperatures for these organisms to thrive.

Is it safe?

For humans, yes. For marine life, not so much.

While the red tide is typically not toxic to people, Lucas said the bioluminescence can have “a pretty significant impact” on marine life. After the 2020 red tide in San Diego, the dying plankton starved the water of oxygen, leading to mass fish kill offs.