Is it safe to travel to Mexico? Here's what you need to know “These are normally nursery habitats for fisheries … and once they’re devoid of oxygen, we have lost that habitat.” It comes in such “large quantities that it basically sucks the oxygen out of the water and creates what we refer to as dead zones,” Lapointe said. Sargassum can also quickly turn from an asset to a threat to ocean life. The problems with sargassum arise when it hits the beaches, piling up in mounds that can be difficult to navigate and emitting a gas that can smell like rotten eggs. “It serves as a critical habitat for threatened loggerhead sea turtles and as a nursery area for a variety of commercially important fishes such as mahi mahi, jacks, and amberjacks.” “This floating habitat provides food and protection for fishes, mammals, marine birds, crabs, and more,” according to the Sargassum Information Hub, a joint project among various research institutions. When adrift at sea, the algae can have upsides for ocean life. Sargassum is a catchall term that can be used to refer to more than 300 species of brown algae, although Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans are the two species most commonly found in the Atlantic. Here’s what you should know about why these masses happen and how they affect both humans and ocean life. “This is an entirely new oceanographic phenomenon that is creating such a problem - really a catastrophic problem - for tourism in the Caribbean region, where it piles up on beaches up to 5 or 6 feet deep,” Lapointe said. The seaweed is expected to show up on beaches in Florida around July, Lapointe said. Traveling west, the blob will push through the Caribbean and up into the Gulf of Mexico during the summer. Workers remove sargassum from a beach in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, in June.
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