Authorities across the Caribbean are releasing emergency funding to clean up piles of decaying seaweed so huge and pungent that tourists have cancelled summer beach holidays and lawmakers on Tobago have deemed it a “natural disaster”.

 

The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect from the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of plant matter that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs.

 

Clumps of the brownish seaweed, known as sargassum, have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae has exploded in extent and frequency in recent years.

 

From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico’s Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up to nearly three meters (10 feet) high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.

 

With the start of the region’s high tourism season a few months away, some officials are calling for an emergency meeting of the 15-nation Caribbean Community, worried that the worsening seaweed influx could become a chronic dilemma for the globe’s most tourism-dependent region.

 

There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed boom that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.

 

Brian Lapointe, a sargassum expert at Florida Atlantic University, says that while the sargassum washing up in normal amounts has long been good for the Caribbean, severe influxes like those seen lately are “harmful algal blooms” because they can cause wipe out fish populations, foul the beach, harm tourism revenue and even cause coastal dead zones.

 

The mats of drifting sargassum covered with berry-like sacs have become so numerous in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean they are even drifting as far away as Sierre Leone and Ghana.

 

Sargassum, which gets its name from the Portuguese word for grape, is a floating brownish algae that generally blooms in the Sargasso Sea, a three million-square-kilometer (two million-square-mile) body of warm water in the north Atlantic that is a major habitat and nursery for numerous marine species. Like coral reefs, the algae mats are critical habitats and mahi-mahi, tuna, billfish, eels, shrimp, crabs and sea turtles all use the algae to spawn, feed or hide from predators.

 

But some scientists believe the sargassum besieging a growing number of beaches may actually be due to blooms in the Atlantic’s equatorial region, perhaps because of a high flow of nutrients from South America’s Amazon and Orinoco rivers mixing with warmer ocean temperatures.

 

Whatever the reason, the massive sargassum flow is becoming a major challenge for tourism-dependent countries. In large doses, the algae harms coastal environments, even causing the deaths of endangered sea turtle hatchlings after they wriggle out of the sand where their eggs were buried. Clean-up efforts by work crews may also worsen beach erosion.

 

Mexican authorities will spend about $9.1m and hire 4,600 workers to clean up seaweed mounds accumulating along that country’s Caribbean coast. Part of the money will be used to determine whether the sargassum can be collected at sea before it reaches shore.

 

 

PHOTO: Seaweed blankets the beach in Cancun, Mexico. The huge influx of sargassum has hit most of the Caribbean this year and prompted cancellations from tourists.

CREDIT: Israel Leal/AP.