Some stories have additionally sparked fears of “flesh-eating bacteria” among the many algae, however there isn’t any proof for this. When individuals come into shut contact with rotting sargassum, they’ll expertise well being issues, together with diarrhea, vomiting, and eye irritation, so it’s generally extra than simply an inconvenience. Plus, whereas native authorities have spent millions eradicating sargassum from seashores, they’ve invariably extracted giant volumes of sand within the course of, accelerating coastal erosion.

Given the problems brought on by the seaweed, researchers are on the lookout for higher methods to observe its actions to allow them to perceive what elements affect the extent—and trajectory—of sargassum blooms.

“This year was very curious,” says Gustavo Goni, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Lab, recalling the report volumes of sargassum that scientists detected floating at sea within the first few months of 2023. They reached a peak round March, after which, in a extremely uncommon flip, the sargassum glut started to shrink.

NOAA publishes a regularly updated sargassum report online that estimates the chance of seaside inundations across the Gulf of Mexico. The administration works with the University of South Florida to supply this data, and the college additionally puts out separate data gleaned from satellite tv for pc monitoring. This reveals that the sargassum belt was notably in depth throughout May in 2018, 2021, and 2022, whereas in May 2023 it was much less so, although not by a lot. “This year is still a major sargassum year,” says Chuanmin Hu on the University of South Florida.

Satellite-derived snapshots of the seaweed’s unfold are essential, however they don’t reveal precisely what inundations are like on the bottom. Hu and his colleagues accumulate information from the sphere, however members of the general public additionally play a task. “We very much need citizen science,” says Goni, noting that individuals can ship footage and movies of the seaweed to NOAA through the sargassum report net web page. Jimenez-Mariani provides that she often shares stories of sightings with scientists.

Hu says that many elements would possibly affect the expansion and move of sargassum, in addition to whether or not it truly finally ends up on a seaside—from gentle ranges to ocean currents, winds, temperature, and tides.

To higher observe the motion of the algae out at sea—earlier than it causes points on land—Linda Amaral-Zettler on the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and colleagues are engaged on methods of tagging the sargassum, or planting drifters in the course of giant floating clumps of it. “The idea is to get one stuck in a patch and have it move with a patch,” she says of the drifter units they’re growing.

The difficult half is that floating sargassum usually sinks after a short while. “The probability of a tag being lost is relatively high,” says Amaral-Zettler. She says there are greater than 350 species of sargassum, however most don’t float on the ocean floor in any respect—just a few species are answerable for the big drifts which were inflicting issues for vacationers and locals in seaside cities lately. Away from seashores, sargassum supplies an necessary habitat for turtles and some fish.