Four new tests in the Toolbox, and the order you should actually use them in.
Here is the sequence almost every lake community follows when the water turns. Somebody posts a photo. Somebody says it looks like the algae from two summers ago. Somebody else says close the beach. Within a day there are three theories and no evidence, and whatever gets decided is decided by whoever sounded most certain.
We have added four tests to the Toolbox to end that conversation faster, and the order matters more than any of them individually.
First: what do you actually have?
The instinct is to jump straight to "is it toxic." That is the wrong first question, because toxin tests are narrow. Each one looks for a single compound, and a clean result for one tells you nothing about the others.
Rapid Bloom ID & Cell Count answers the question underneath. Microscopic identification and cell counts of the harmful algal bloom taxa in your sample, back in 24 hours of the lab receiving it. The kit ships with a cooler, ice pack, and overnight return label.
It is the most expensive of the four, and it is the one we would tell you to buy first. Knowing your bloom is dominated by Microcystis points at one toxin. Dolichospermum points at a different one. And a fair number of blooms turn out not to be cyanobacteria at all — finding that out in a day, for one fee, is the cheapest good news available.
Then: the targeted toxin test
Once you know the organism, the toxin test stops being a guess.
Microcystin — the liver toxin, the most common cyanotoxin in North American fresh water, and the one most state advisory thresholds are written around. This is the beach-closure toxin.
Saxitoxin — a neurotoxin, the same compound behind paralytic shellfish poisoning. This is why a clean microcystin result is not an all-clear. Different species, different toxin, same alarming-looking water.
Anatoxin-a — the fastest-acting of the three, and the one most often implicated in sudden dog deaths. It was once called Very Fast Death Factor, which tells you most of what you need to know.
The one exception to the order
If an animal has collapsed or died after being in the water, do not wait for an identification. Sample for anatoxin immediately.
Anatoxin degrades in sunlight and moving water within days. A sample taken after the weekend can come back clean from water that was lethal on Saturday. That is the one case where speed beats sequence.
What comes before all of this
Every test above is a response. They are what you buy once something has already happened, and by then your options have narrowed to managing it.
The conditions that produce a bloom develop over weeks — warming surface water, calm weather, nutrients arriving in spring, oxygen falling at depth. None of that is visible from a dock, and all of it is measurable.
The Lake Sentinel Buoy logs continuously and alerts when readings cross a threshold you set. Chlorophyll-a tracks algal biomass across a season, so a bad August is legible against four previous ones. Dissolved oxygen catches the pre-dawn minimum that a site visit never will.
None of those prevent a bloom. What they do is remove the surprise — and give you a record that turns next summer's photo on the group chat into a question with an answer attached.
Where to start
If there is a bloom in your lake right now, start with Rapid Bloom ID. If there is not, start with the monitoring that means you see the next one coming.
If you are not sure which, that is what the Boathouse is for. There is nothing we gain from selling you a test you do not need.
Cyanobacteria produce more toxins than these three — cylindrospermopsin, nodularin, guanitoxin and others. If you need one that is not in the Lab Testing aisle, contact us and we will arrange it.
