“I got to go up in a helicopter with a news crew,” Lovko says. “You could see the front of the bloom right along the coast”—a reddish cloud of millions of microscopic organisms called dinoflagellates ...

It can ID dinoflagellates and planktonic algae, but is specifically designed to ID toxic cyanobacteria, commonly called blue-green algae. Swelling visible in the microscope is among the clues the ...