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Scientists say global climate change is responsible for the spread of massive blobs of floating marine mucus. The blobs are concentrated along Italy’s coast but have been spotted in more than 20 oceans around the world. The blobs are harmful to humans and sea life. And they’re taking a toll on Italy’s multi-billion euro tourism economy. The World’s Marina Giovannelli reports.
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MARCO WERMAN: Researchers are finding other surprises in the world’s seas as well. Here’s The World’s Marina Giovannelli.
MARINA GIOVANNELLI: A few years ago Serena Fonda Umani took a dip off the Italian coast in the Adriatic Sea. But her swim was not as refreshing as you might expect.
SERENA FONDA UMANI: To swim with these blobs it was something very strange because you have this feeling like a ghost hanging over you.
GIOVANNELLI: That ghost Umani is talking about is what scientists call marine mucilage or what you and I might just call a blob.
UMANI: If you swim naked when you get out of the water you were covered by a sort of sugar and it was not such a great pleasure.
GIOVANNELLI: Umani didn’t just swim into the blob by accident. She’s a marine ecologist at the University of Trieste and was collecting blob samples for her lab.
UMANI: This large accumulation of jelly material are basically sugar as I said before – polysaccharides.
ROBERTO DONAVARO: These aggregates represent a very strange form of existence.
GIOVANNELLI: Roberto Donavaro is Serena Umani’s colleague and president of the Italian Association of Limnology and Oceanography. He says the blobs themselves aren’t alive per se. The sugar that makes them up is basically what we think of as mucus. And that mucus traps bacteria, crustations, and other tiny critters.
DONAVARO: So it’s a strange environment that deserves further study.
GIOVANNELLI: They’re not however an entirely new phenomenon. They’ve been spotted in the Mediterranean for centuries. But in the past two decades scientists have tracked a sharp increase. During the unusually warm winter of 2007 Donavaro and Umani found blobs floating off 60% of Italy’s coast. And they’ve also documented the blobs creeping into new corners of the globe.
DONAVARO: Records are being reported from New Zealand to the Tonga Islands from Canada to the United States. So we can say there are no seas which are without any possibility of this problem in the future.
GIOVANNELLI: Donavaro says there’s more mucus because the seas are getting warmer and that heat he says … .
DONAVARO: is a physiological stress over the algae that produce mucus like we do when we get a cold.
[SNEEZE]
GIOVANNELLI: Donavaro and Umani recently published their findings in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE and they resonate with observations of other researchers.
ALLICE ALDREDGE: There’s no doubt that increases in temperature are having some relationship to this particular phenomena.
GIOVANNELLI: Marine ecologist Allice Aldredge studies gelatinous plankton at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s not entirely convinced that hotter seas are directly responsible for the blobs. She says nay number of human activities could be involved. Whatever the cause though Aldredge agrees that the growing presence of sea blobs is a problem. They can blanket huge patches of sea, suffocate other marine life, and clog up fishing nets. And the blobs could also be a problem for swimmers. That’s because the research suggests they’re loaded with bacteria and other pathogens.
ALDREDGE: They’re relating of course this mucilage and the high virus content of it as well to skin problems. So I think there are some real health issues here.
GIOVANNELLI: And in the short term that could mean some real problems for Italy’s tourism economy. Mara Manentes studies the economics of tourism at the University of Venice.
MARA MANENTES: If tourists think that water is contaminated for sure this is a very, very negative effect.
GIOVANNELLI: And if researchers are right the negative effects of the sea blobs might be coming soon to a beach near you. For The World I’m Marina Giovannelli.
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