I  t might have been one of Alfred Hitchcock’s fanciful tales of the supernatural: a 5,000-mile wide blob of murky seaweed creeping menacingly acros

Clumps of 5,000-mile seaweed blob bring flesh-eating bacteria to Florida

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2023-06-04 05:30:04

I t might have been one of Alfred Hitchcock’s fanciful tales of the supernatural: a 5,000-mile wide blob of murky seaweed creeping menacingly across the Atlantic before dumping itself along the US shoreline.

But now giant clumps of the 13m-ton morass labeled the Great Atlantic sargassum belt are washing up on Florida’s beaches, scientists are warning of a real-life threat from the piles of decomposing algae, namely high levels of the flesh-eating Vibrio bacteria lurking in the vegetation.

The alarming discovery by marine biologists at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) lends a dangerous new aspect to the brown seaweed onslaught, which is already threatening to spoil the state’s busy summer tourism season as coatings of decaying goop exude a pungent aroma akin to that of rotting eggs.

Even more worrying, the researchers say, is the role of ocean pollution in the proliferation of the bacteria, which can cause disease and death if a person gets infected. Samples tested from the Caribbean and Sargasso Sea within the Atlantic were abundant with plastic debris, which interacted with the algae and bacteria to create a “perfect pathogen storm [with] implications for both marine life and public health”.

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