File:Pfiesteria shumwayae.jpg|
Pfiesteria shumwayae File:Coast watch (1979) (20471959890).jpg|
Pfiesteria piscicida The media has applied the term carnivorous or predatory algae mainly to
Pfiesteria piscicida,
Pfiesteria shumwayae and other
Pfiesteria-like
dinoflagellates implicated in
harmful algal blooms and
fish kills.
Pfiesteria is named after the American protistologist
Lois Ann Pfiester. It is an
ambush predator that utilizes a hit and run feeding strategy by releasing a toxin that paralyzes the respiratory systems of susceptible fish, such as
menhaden, thus causing death by
suffocation. It then consumes the tissue sloughed off its dead prey.
Pfiesteria piscicida () has been blamed for killing more than one billion fish in the
Neuse and
Pamlico river
estuaries in
North Carolina and causing
skin lesions in humans in the 1990s. and has earned the organism the reputation as the "
T. rex of the dinoflagellate world" or "the Cell from Hell." The prominent and exaggerating media coverage of
Pfiesteria as carnivorous algae attacking fish and humans has been implicated in causing "
Pfiesteria hysteria" in the
Chesapeake Bay in 1997 resulting in an apparent outbreak of human illness in the
Pocomoke region in
Maryland. However, a study published the following year concluded the symptoms were unlikely to be caused by
mass hysteria. == In popular culture ==