Sargassum surges in Mexico: From nuisance to new green industry?
by Sandra Weiss on 17 May 2023
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2023 is shaping up to be a banner year for sargassum, a type of brown macroalgae now starting to wash up on beaches across the Caribbean. The thick dead tangled heaps of seaweed stink like rotten eggs and could cost many millions in holiday revenues this summer.
Explosive growth and overabundance of sargassum in recent years is possibly due to overuse by Brazilian industrial agribusiness of nutrient-rich synthetic fertilizers, which run off into tributaries feeding the Amazon River and the warming Atlantic Ocean. Fertilization by sewage flowing into the sea could also contribute.
But some entrepreneurs see this annual pest as a bonanza.
Close-up of floating brown algae in Mexico. Image courtesy of Rosa Elisa Rodríguez Martínez.
An oceangoing nuisance whose time has come
Sargassum isn’t new to the shores of Quintana Roo state in southeast Mexico. Researcher Rosa Elisa Rodríguez Martínez at the Institute of Marine Science and Limnorelogy of the National Autonomous University lives in the coastal city of Puerto Morelos and she recalls the brown weeds washing ashore for decades. “But always in quite small quantities and during a short season.”
But from 2011 onward, quantities grew exponentially and the algae season extended longer. 2023 is on track to set a record for the disruptive vegetative plague. This spring, scientists at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science spotted a big yellowish-brown seaweed belt drifting from the Atlantic Ocean toward the Gulf of Mexico; they estimated its weight at 13 million tons, a record density for March.
More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/sargassum-surges-in-mexico-from-nuisance-to-new-green-industry/
= new reply since forum marked as read
oh, never mind.
