Texas Red Tide Status

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department publishes the current status, and the panel at the top of this page shows what it is reporting right now, reproduced as issued with the time of its most recent update attached. When the agency is reporting nothing, the panel says so. For the official version, go to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department directly.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department states: "Texas red tides have occurred from August through February." On that basis the usual stretch runs August 1 to February 28, with the busiest weeks September 15 to November 30. TPWD gives the Texas window as August through February, which is close to the Florida pattern and for the same reason: it is the same organism arriving from the same Gulf. Unlike Florida it is episodic rather than near annual, so most years in that window produce nothing at all. That is a climatological typical and not a forecast: blooms happen outside it, and some years produce very little.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department publishes this wording: "Red tide has happened before, and the Texas marine environment has always recovered." That is the agency's sentence, quoted, and the agency is the authority. Whether a particular spot is open on a particular day is decided by the people posting signs at the access point, who looked at that specific water today.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, TPWD 24 hour communications centre, Texas Department of State Health Services, Seafood and Aquatic Life Group, NOAA NCCOS harmful algal bloom forecast. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department event driven. TPWD posts a status update only when a bloom is confirmed.. Each of them is linked on this page, with a phone number where one is published.

No. The organisms monitored in Texas do not have to discolour the water to reach the levels an agency acts on, and the toxins involved are invisible, tasteless, and not removed by cooking. Every agency on these pages says some version of the same thing: what the water looks like is not the test, and the published status is.

Harvest closures are legal orders issued by Texas Department of State Health Services, Seafood and Aquatic Life Group, they change without warning, and getting one wrong is a hospital matter. Check Texas Department of State Health Services, Seafood and Aquatic Life Group directly, on the day, every time. Texas closures come in more than one flavour. TPWD has pointed out that at least one closure was driven by rainfall rather than by red tide, so a closed bay does not tell you a bloom is running and an open one does not tell you it is not.

No. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's own framing is that these are recurring events rather than one-off ones, and the monitoring programmes behind them run whether or not there is anything to find. A season with little to report is a normal part of the pattern rather than the end of it, which is why this page leads with when blooms normally happen and only then shows what is being reported today.

It is a separate NOAA product from the cell counts. NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science combines the most recent cell counts with forecast wind to predict what people standing on specific named beaches are likely to feel over roughly the next day, and publishes a category for each station. It answers a different question from the cell count, which is why this page shows both and labels each with the agency that issued it rather than merging them into one number. NOAA only runs stations where there is something to forecast, so the list of beaches changes through the year and is often empty.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department states: "Status updates will be posted here as they become available. Please note that red tide blooms are not usually present in Texas coastal waters. Therefore this page will only be updated in the event of a confirmed red tide algal bloom." That is the cadence to plan around. For the situation today, the agency's own page and phone line are the answer.

Red tide means a marine bloom, in the Gulf of Mexico usually Karenia brevis, which produces brevetoxins and causes respiratory irritation carried in sea spray. Blue-green algae means freshwater cyanobacteria such as Microcystis, which bloom in lakes and slow rivers and produce a different family of toxins. Different organisms, different water, different monitoring programmes, and a status for one says nothing about the other. This page covers Gulf coast Karenia brevis red tide.