The Ocean 'Was the Color of Chocolate.' Mexico Declares War on Seaweed.

Posted by bookofjoe 1 day ago

Counter46Comment60OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by ks2048 20 hours ago

A picture I took yesterday on the beach in Tulum,

https://imgur.com/a/HkYhIhx

Comment by pier25 13 hours ago

Not that bad actually. They probably clean this beach daily for tourists.

Back when I lived in Cancún I remember 1-2 meters high mountains of sargassum in less touristic beaches like Playa Coral.

Eg: https://irp.cdn-website.com/f070c7e5/dms3rep/multi/Sargazo+C...

Comment by bookofjoe 1 day ago

https://archive.ph/VubVx

Comment by stefpap 3 hours ago

We have been having a similar issue in my hometown in Greece (photo from this June: https://i2.prth.gr/files/2026-06-08/thermaikos-plankton-mkt....). Ours is plankton and I think the cause might be runoff from fertilizers and years of wastewater. It started getting worse around 2017.

Comment by DASD 20 hours ago

NOAA's reporting tool

https://research.noaa.gov/noaa-sargassum-tool-now-provides-d...

Comment by liveoneggs 20 hours ago

who knew runoff from tons of fertilizer and adding load of CO2 to the oceans would grow plants

Comment by goodmythical 19 hours ago

It is interesting that the equivalent pesticide dumping has balanced out to plant growth.

I wonder if the seeweed is naturally Monsanto Ready and we could harvest this gene for a green room implementation to subvert the grip they exert over their crop lines.

Comment by throwup238 19 hours ago

If you’re going to make snarky vacuous comments, it’d help to get your biology right. Sargassum is algae, not a plant.

Comment by Cpoll 17 hours ago

That's true in a taxonomical context, but it's not incorrect to call algae "plants" by other definitions. Another example: many pedants overlook that a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.

Comment by euroderf 3 hours ago

And EU-bureaucratically, a carrot is a fruit, because of some odd Portuguese product.

Comment by bigstrat2003 16 hours ago

Yeah, the best way to put it that I've seen is that tomatoes are botanically fruits, but culinarily vegetables.

Comment by eckmLJE 15 hours ago

In fact, "vegetable" is not a botanical term at all

Comment by amanaplanacanal 19 hours ago

Algae aren't plants?! I guess I need to dive back into taxonomy.

Comment by Cpoll 17 hours ago

They're eukarya, but their kingdom is protist (i.e. the catch-all kingdom for stuff that's not an animal, fungi or land plant).

But outside of taxonomy, it's not incorrect to call them plants.

Comment by tablarasa 15 hours ago

It is incorrect. They are not plants. I am curious why you think it is correct to call protists plants? It is not just taxonomy, but ecology, life history, tissue structures, and so much more. Some plants do photosynthesis. Some algae do photosynthesis. Not all things that do photosynthesis are plants. Not all things that do not do photosynthesis are not plants.

Comment by BobaFloutist 14 hours ago

Presumably because "plant" was a word used to describe all sessile, photosynthesizing organisms visible with the naked eye long before we developed sophisticated enough tools to scientifically separate sea-weed from other plants.

Also, I'm not an expert, and I know Wikipedia isn't the most authoritative source, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant#Alternative_concepts seems to suggest that green algae are, at least at times, scientifically considered the parent group of land plants. So there's that, too.

Comment by jgalt212 19 hours ago

Yes, you're right algae produce way more oxygen than plants.

Comment by jgalt212 19 hours ago

I know Bill Gates thinks planting trees is a waste of time, but are the oceans doing this task for him?

Comment by liveoneggs 15 hours ago

I think the environment wants to balance itself back to "normal" levels (back under 300 ppm CO2) - like this algae wants to grow super fast, absorb tons of carbon and chemicals, and turn itself into coal or whatever but there is a nasty middle step of poisoning the beaches and killing all of the animals near-shore.

Comment by xattt 23 hours ago

Is the title a take on the Neuromancer intro?

Comment by WillAdams 21 hours ago

It's an actual quote from the article, but yes, that is an evocative reference.

Comment by linksnapzz 18 hours ago

The ocean next to the port city was the color of chocolate; congealing in a stone molcajete...

Comment by Cpoll 17 hours ago

The ocean under the port was the color of television, tuned to a cooking show about chocolate.

Comment by pier25 20 hours ago

I lived in Cancun 10 years ago and this was already a huge issue back then.

Comment by 19 hours ago

Comment by singularity2001 18 hours ago

while sargassum is a bane for beaches, corals, and tourist industries, it's a big boon for ocean life far off the coast.

Comment by daneel_w 22 hours ago

Can this particular weed be eaten as-is, by human or animal, or is it known to e.g. be toxic or full of waste? Because it seems to me rather beneficial that the ocean washes it up on the shoreline ready for pick-up.

Comment by RetroTechie 20 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargassum#Sustainable_uses

Find a way to lower salt & arsenic content, and it could be an excellent fertilizer.

Comment by erkt 21 hours ago

Currently no good use for it other than as a Biochar. Come up with a solution and save billions for the tourism industry.

Comment by Aboutplants 20 hours ago

Yup, every time this issue comes up the first question is can it be used for anything? Turns out, the answer so far has been a resounding “no”. It’s a super interesting problem from a purely analytical perspective as you run into roadblocks any time you think of a potential use case

Comment by alexpotato 20 hours ago

There was a story about a guy using the seaweed as a binder for concrete.

More general details here: https://materialdistrict.com/article/from-algae-to-architect...

Comment by close04 22 hours ago

If I remember correctly this seaweed accumulates arsenic. They tried to use it as fertilizer before discovering this, and made the crop and the land unusable. Even burning it is dangerous.

This is a losing battle if all they do is shovel or fish it faster. The conditions in the environment are such that they favor the seaweed. Treat the cause not the effect, or else they’ll have to employ some very fancy genetic engineering to halt it.

Comment by stalfie 20 hours ago

Huh, so it is essentially a potential fix for an arsenic problem? Of course, it probably just releases the arsenic again as it decomposes, so you'd actually have to get it out of the ocean and dump it in a hole somewhere to get the arsenic out of circulation. Pretty funny if this is what is happening, carbon and arsenic capture courtesy of the Mexican tourist industry!

Comment by glimshe 22 hours ago

If the US was doing it, we'd only need a Little Excursion against Seaweed!

Comment by nilamo 19 hours ago

The US wouldn't take action against the seaweed, unless it was in a fishing boat. Then it'd be ruthlessly assaulted with all seaweed and fishermen slaughtered, while claiming the seaweed was actually drugs.

Comment by dessimus 21 hours ago

...lasting most of a decade.

Comment by karmakurtisaani 23 hours ago

I hate this "War on X" rhetoric. They're not going to bomb the ocean or send troops to shoot it, so why make it sound like it? Just say what they're actually going to do about it.

Comment by mathgeek 22 hours ago

If war is a constant of humanity, better it be against the seaweed than the people. Jokes aside, I agree, but in general folks love dramatic names.

Comment by dn3500 20 hours ago

"War on X" was originally a way of mocking Richard Nixon's "War on drugs". Everyone thought it was a stupid term at the time, for the reasons you list. So we started talking about the "war on cheap beer", the "war on disco music", etc (I was in college at the time). I'm not sure when people started using the term seriously.

Comment by karmakurtisaani 19 hours ago

Sounds like we need a War on "War on X"-headlines.

Comment by chrisweekly 19 hours ago

Tangent - The War On Drugs is an excellent band.

Comment by baxtr 23 hours ago

They’re gonna kill the whole ocean and conquer it in its entirety. Any resistance by the ocean will be futile!

Comment by chao- 23 hours ago

Perhaps if they demonstrate a decisive victory over the forces of one Seaweed Lord, and they offer reasonable terms to the rest, they can win their vassalage without further bloodshed?

Comment by AspireOne 21 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by jannyfer 22 hours ago

In the article they did send the navy.

Comment by DotNetCorePowa 22 hours ago

When the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

Comment by thephyber 20 hours ago

At least the War on Seaweed is more real than the War on Christmas.

> Just say what they're actually going to do about it.

People don't have infinite attention. That's why headlines and slogans carry so well, even when they are lossy/misleading to the reality.

Comment by idontwantthis 19 hours ago

I lost my best friend to the War on Christmas. His body came home stuffed with pine needles and partridge feathers.

Comment by karmakurtisaani 19 hours ago

"Those damn elves.. They came out of nowhere.. And were long gone by the time the napalm started raining.. All you could hear was a faint chime of their bells as they retreated to their tunnels.."

Comment by fred_is_fred 20 hours ago

Do not give this administration any ideas, after all Caligula ordered his legions to wade out and attack the waves with swords.

Comment by vconnor 22 hours ago

Whoever's dubbed it so doesn't know it's a quixotic effort they'll never win, just like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

A strange case of nominative determinism.

Comment by 3seashells 21 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by jareklupinski 21 hours ago

the US has summoned the ambassador of Seaweed to answer for this

our chocolate shortage is dire!

Comment by nekusar 21 hours ago

The big answer is not some "war on..." But instead "how can we eat it?" Or "Can it be reprocessed into something useful?"

Comment by undersuit 20 hours ago

Other people are dismissing this idea right off the cuff because of the arsenic concentration but that's a good thing. Now we use it as a feed stock for arsenic loving single celled creature. Then we concentrate it further. And again and again until you have arsenic pure enough for use. Then you can add that arsenic back into the pesticide and herbicide production processes that helped it get into the seawater instead of mining it on land.

Comment by nekusar 18 hours ago

That's my thoughts here.

We have these LLM tools, and the questions is "We have X amounts of sargasso algae, and it bioaccumulates arsenic. What bioremedative pathways to accumulate and extract arsenic, in order to heal the oceans, make safer food, and get pure arsenic for the silicon GaAs Industry?"

I've a friend who has access to base 3d printers, and can print up to 12k RNA base pairs. We're now at the point of growing our own remediation.

The LLMs are sold as a panacea. Time to start having them carry their salt, or their gallium arsenide and silicon.

Comment by Tagbert 19 hours ago

As Close04 mentioned, sargassum accumulates arsenic. You can't eat it or use it as fertilizer without poisoning.

Comment by ekaryotic 19 hours ago

pistachio trees grow on polluted land though, without passing the arsenic to the nuts in lethal amounts. google states they can grow up to 1000mg arsenic/per kg soil. If you were to compost the sargassum, then grow pistachios on it until the arsenic level gets too high to kill the plant, you would at least be a step closer and it would pay for itself via the produce.

Comment by BinaryKnight 21 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by mistrial9 21 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by pseudohadamard 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by gnabgib 1 day ago

Is your political flamebait account going well?

Comment by pseudohadamard 1 day ago

Interesting, so someone just downvoted every otherwise unrelated post I've made in the last day or two. That's quite some OCD you've got going there.

As a tactic though it's a bit like tracers, they work in both directions.

Comment by gnabgib 1 day ago

Outside of my power, but super interesting. Maybe you should continue?

Comment by throwawayfifo 22 hours ago

>As a tactic though it's a bit like tracers, they work in both directions.

False. You cannot see who downvotes your posts.

Comment by Jtarii 23 hours ago

[flagged]