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Seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida ...........................
CNN
March 18, 2023
A seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida. Here's what you should know
By Jackie Wattles and Kristen Rogers, CNN
(CNN) A giant blob of seaweed twice the width of the continental United States is headed for the shores of Florida and other coastlines throughout the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to dump smelly and possibly harmful piles across beaches and dampening tourism season.
Sargassum the specific variety of seaweed has long formed large blooms in the Atlantic Ocean, and scientists have been tracking massive accumulations since 2011. But this year's bloom could be the largest ever, collectively spanning more than 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers) from the shores of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.
This year's sargassum bloom began forming early and doubled in size between December and January, said Dr. Brian Lapointe, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. The mass "was larger in January than it has ever been since this new region of sargassum growth began in 2011," he told CNN International's Rosemary Church.
Workers remove sargassum from a beach in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, in June.
Traveling west, the blob will push through the Caribbean and up into the Gulf of Mexico during the summer. The seaweed is expected to show up on beaches in Florida around July, Lapointe said.
"This is an entirely new oceanographic phenomenon that is creating such a problem really a catastrophic problem for tourism in the Caribbean region, where it piles up on beaches up to 5 or 6 feet deep," Lapointe said.
Here's what you should know about why these masses happen and how they affect both humans and ocean life.
What is sargassum?
Sargassum is a catchall term that can be used to refer to more than 300 species of brown algae, although Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans are the two species most commonly found in the Atlantic.
When adrift at sea, the algae can have upsides for ocean life.
"This floating habitat provides food and protection for fishes, mammals, marine birds, crabs, and more," according to the Sargassum Information Hub, a joint project among various research institutions. "It serves as a critical habitat for threatened loggerhead sea turtles and as a nursery area for a variety of commercially important fishes such as mahi mahi, jacks, and amberjacks."
Is sargassum safe?
The problems with sargassum arise when it hits the beaches, piling up in mounds that can be difficult to navigate and emitting a gas that can smell like rotten eggs.
Sargassum can also quickly turn from an asset to a threat to ocean life.
It comes in such "large quantities that it basically sucks the oxygen out of the water and creates what we refer to as dead zones," Lapointe said. "These are normally nursery habitats for fisheries ... and once they're devoid of oxygen, we have lost that habitat."
Sargassum can be dangerous to humans, too, Lapointe added. The gas emitted from the rotting algae hydrogen sulfide is toxic and can cause respiratory problems. The seaweed also contains arsenic in its flesh, making it dangerous if ingested or used for fertilizer.
"You have to be very careful when you clean the beaches," Lapointe said.
Why is there a sargassum problem?
Just like plants and crops on the ground, the proliferation of seaweed can shift year to year depending on ecological factors, affected by changes in nutrients, rainfall and wind conditions, said Dr. Gustavo Jorge Goni, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
Sea currents are also influential on sargassum's growth and how much it accumulates, Goni added. Phosphorus and nitrogen in the sea can serve as food for the algae.
Those elements can be dumped into the ocean from rivers, which gain concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen from human activities such as agriculture and fossil fuel production, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
For now, researchers are looking into ways to thwart the seaweed's impact on beaches, possibly by sinking it to the bottom of the ocean or harvesting it for use in commercial products such as soap, Goni said.
Goni cautioned that research into these sargassum accumulations is new, and it's likely scientists' understanding of how the algae grows will shift over time.
"Whatever we believe we know today," he said, "it may change tomorrow."
How does the buildup affect travel?
Before traveling to coastal areas this spring or summer, research whether sargassum is at your destination or might show up there, Lapointe said. Plan ahead so your vacation won't disappoint.
There are sargassum Facebook groups, with members posting about what they recently saw on beaches, Lapointe said.
"It's already affected the travel industry," he said.
Tourists enjoy the beach despite the sargassum algae buildup in Cancun, Mexico, in May 2021.
Unfortunately, sargassum can build up overnight so you might not be able to predict its effects on a trip, Lapointe said.
"This is why we're trying to work on these early warning systems high resolution in coastal areas, which takes higher-resolution satellite imagery to do a better job showing what's actually coming into a beach within the next 24 or 48 hours," he added.
Satellite images from within the last week show sargassum isn't an amorphous mass moving across the ocean, but rather teardrop-shaped blobs trailed by long, thin strands of seaweed.
Within the last week, sargassum blobs have been spotted about 215 miles (346 kilometers) from Guadeloupe, in between the islands of St. Vincent and Bequia, 1,000 yards (914 meters) off Martinique and off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
How is sargassum cleaned up?
Mounds of algae accumulated on beaches cost millions of dollars to clean up, and removal efforts can also harm marine life, according to the Sargassum Information Hub.
In Barbados, locals were using "1,600 dump trucks a day to clean the beaches of this seaweed to make it suitable for tourists and recreation on the beaches," Lapointe said.
In shallow waters, sargassum can be removed using fishing nets towed by light boats or by hand, according to the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance.
In the US, cleanup is often done with Barber beach rakes pulled by a tractor, Lapointe said. But once there's an accumulation of more than a foot of sargassum, the rakes don't work as well, he added. That's when front-end loader dump trucks can be helpful, but they can be harmful to beach health.
Use of dump trucks to remove sargassum can become problematic.
"Oftentimes you have sea turtle nests on beaches that are being run over by tires of this heavy equipment crushing the eggs," Lapointe said.
What happens if sargassum isn't removed from beaches?
If sargassum isn't cleaned from beaches or is used as fertilizer, the arsenic in its flesh could leach out into groundwater, which could be a health hazard for humans, Lapointe said.
An excessive amount of rotting sargassum can also support the growth of fecal bacteria.
And in 2018, a massive bloom that ended up on the beaches of South Florida coincided with the biggest red tide ever seen on that coast, Lapointe said. Red tides occur when toxin-producing algae blooms grow so out of control they discolor coastal waters. Red tide organisms can live on sargassum and be transported by it.
The toxins in red tides can harm marine life, and sargassum buildup on beaches can prevent sea turtle hatchlings and adults from getting to sea, Lapointe said.
Will this happen every year?
Experts don't know whether a sargassum bloom of this size will happen every year, Lapointe said.
"It's hard to project because we don't know everything we need to know about the drivers (behind this)," he said. "We know it's variable from year to year and that the trajectory is generally going upwards. So based on what we've seen in the past, we're thinking we could continue to see this worsen for years to come. What will it be like in 10 years? Will it be double the size it is now?"
More funding to do the research that could answer these questions is needed, he added.
WSJ -- Ocean garbage patch / Anemones and barnacles thrive on toothbrushes and ...................
April 17, 2023
Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Is Bursting With Life
Anemones and barnacles thrive on toothbrushes and bottle shards thousands of miles from shore
By Nidhi Subbaraman
An 80,000-ton cloud of plastic and trash floating in the Pacific Ocean is an environmental disaster. It is also teeming with life.
Biologists who fished toothbrushes, rope and broken bottle shards from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch found them studded with gooseneck barnacles and jet-black sea anemones glistening like buttons. All told, they found 484 marine invertebrates from 46 species clinging to the detritus, they reported Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The trash patch is the product of circular currents that form whirlpool-like gyres in five stretches of the world’s oceans. Plastic and ocean trash are swept into these spaces. A five-day boat ride from the California coast, where it spans over 610,000 square miles, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the biggest of these aggregations. “Micro-plastic” shards less than 5 millimeters long account for most of the debris, suspended in the water like pepper flakes in soup, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Between November 2018 and January 2019, the team collected 105 pieces of debris including nets, buoys and household items such as buckets and toothbrushes. They photographed and froze the objects before bringing them back to land. Ashore at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center laboratories in California and Maryland, they thawed the cargo piece by piece and scoured it for signs of life.
Most of the hitchhikers they found were coastal species that had found a way to thrive in the salty open ocean, a food desert for marine life that experiences punishing temperature extremes, said Linsey Haram, an ecologist and an author of the study.
Marine ecologists said they would expect most coastal species to struggle to survive outside their shoreline habitats. On the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, animals were found growing and reproducing.
“They’re having a blast,” said study author Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at the Dutch nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup. “That’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.”
Anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand, Dr. Egger said, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like micro-plastics. Squeeze an anemone and the shards spew out, he said: “They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.”
Many of the invertebrates -- Pacific oysters, orange-striped anemones, rag worms -- are native to the coast of Japan. Dr. Haram said she suspects they were sucked into the ocean in 2011 by the tsunami that pummeled the Japan coast.
It is a rare chance to see the impact of a natural disaster on the ocean more than a decade after it occurred, said Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist at Georgetown University who has studied organisms at the gyre and wasn’t involved with the study. “We have a lot of coastal species that wouldn’t have made it to the open ocean living on plastic in the high seas.”
The patch is also a haven for animals that are at home on the open ocean. Such species -- sea snails, blue button jellyfish, and a relative called by-the-wind sailors -- gather more densely where there is more plastic, Dr. Helm and her team said in a study posted online ahead of peer-review.
Removing the plastic would mean uprooting them, Dr. Helm said: “Cleaning it up is not actually that simple.”
Write to Nidhi Subbaraman at nidhi.subbaraman@wsj.com
Success for salmon habitat restoration in the Fraser River
Cut off from their essential habitat for more than 100 years, threatened Fraser Chinook salmon find new passage via large-scale estuary project.
The North Arm of the Fraser River Jetty habitat restoration project, estimated at $650,000, provides a unique solution to a century-old problem. The jetty, a 7-kilometre-long barrier, has been forcing young salmon from the freshwater of the Fraser River’s North Arm into the saltier, deeper water of the Strait of Georgia for more than 100 years. As juvenile salmon rely on the brackish marsh habitats that lie in between the river and the Strait of Georgia to rear and feed before they transition to the ocean, the jetty presents a serious barrier to their well being.
“Estuaries are really important nursery habitats for many species including juvenile Pacific salmon,” says Dr. Isobel Pearsall, director of PSF’s Marine Science program. “This environment allows them to obtain rich food resources so they can grow bigger before they migrate into the open ocean.”
As part of the project, Raincoast Conservation Foundation made a deliberate breach in the North Arm jetty in early March; they have been monitoring the 30-metre wide opening, and are already observing juvenile salmon passing through.
This immediate success makes this habitat restoration project rare.
The project is led by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and its partners, including the Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF), Ducks Unlimited, Tsawwassen First Nation, and Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance. Harrison River Chinook used to be the most productive Chinook salmon population in the Fraser, but has been declining for more than a decade and is now considered threatened by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). Juvenile Chinook, likely from the Harrison River, have been captured using the breach passage during spring 2022.
“Juvenile salmon rely on access to estuary habitats to adapt to salty waters and for important feeding opportunities that can improve their ability to survive in the ocean,” says Dave Scott, a biologist with Raincoast and a PhD-candidate in the Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Lab at UBC.
The Lower Fraser River and estuary is a highly modified environment with more than 80% of tidal marsh habitats, which juvenile salmon rely on, either lost or inaccessible. On the Fraser delta, this includes the jetties, causeways, and training walls that were built to control the arms of the river for ship navigation.
This restoration follows on Raincoast’s success creating three breaches in the Fraser River’s South Arm on the Steveston Jetty in 2019. Raincoast biologists found high numbers of juvenile salmon passing through to reach the marsh on Sturgeon Bank, instead of being swept out to the Georgia Strait. Raincoast plans on creating two more 30-metre-wide breaches in the North Arm Jetty to continue to restore natural migration pathways for juvenile salmon, other fish species, and natural flow of freshwater and fine sediments.
“Given our understanding of how vital estuaries are, it is only right that we start to fix some of the damage we humans have caused. Projects like this are really important to address some of the issues we have caused to juvenile salmon habitat…and hopefully give these fish a fighting chance on their way into the open ocean,” says Dr. Pearsall.
This project was made possible by funding from the Pacific Salmon Foundation, the Province of BC and the Government of Canada.
100,000 live salmon spilled off a truck in Oregon. Most landed in a creek and lived. spokesman.com
April 4, 2024
On a recent morning in March, while dew was still on the road, there occurred the salmon smolt mishap of northeast Oregon.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said on Tuesday that one of its tankers was in an accident on March 29, resulting in the escape of thousands of live salmon that were being moved as part of a federal and state program to replenish stocks depleted by dams.
In an undated photo from U.S. Fish and Wildlife, chinook smolts that were being carried in a tanker truck that crashed on an Oregon highway, spilling more than 100,000 of the fish. Most of the fish flopped into a creek off the road, and they are expected to survive and continue their journey to the Pacific Ocean. (U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife via New York Times)
