Wednesday beach walk

It feels so damn good to be home! Woke up this morning and cuddled with Jeremy and the dogs although now the dogs are kicked off of the bed and couch due to muddy paws and pee pee accidents.

We hopped out of bed and went straight to the beach this morning. Just a little tiny beach where nobody is usually hanging out. We let Azrael run around and looked at the beach up close. Since the tropical storms have moved through, they have changed some of the beaches dramatically.

We noticed a bunch of sargassum all over the sand. This was probably blown in from the Storms. Azrael was going crazy chasing it and throwing it around. We got some cute pics.

Since 2011 sargassum has been appearing regularly on beaches throughout the Caribbean but hitting emergency proportions in 2018. The unwelcomed mass influx of sargassum lead to a decline in fishing numbers, entangled their nets and propellers. That’s bad, but even worse, it drowns sea turtles and dolphins by weighing them down and causing them to be tangled up and unable to reach the surface and breathe the air. The dense tangle of seaweed eventually sinks to the ocean floor, smothering seagrass meadows and coral reefs. In fact, the sargassum became so dangerous for the beach that Barbados declared a national emergency about it.

But sargassum itself is not a bad thing. The ocean actually needs it and benefits from it. The patches of dense brown seaweed were referred to as “the golden floating rainforest” by Sylvia Earle, one of my personal heroes. Freshly hatched baby turtles rely on sargassum to hide from predators in the ocean, and in fact, the seaweed is a popular spot for all kinds of fish to hide and seek out in the big, open ocean.

There is so much that has been unearthed about sargassum and why it has collected in mass proportions since 2011 and why those mass proportions peaked in 2018. We don’t know why there’s so much of it, where exactly it comes from although it is the thought to come from local Caribbean waters. There are several different schools of thought on why so much sargassum has been produced in recent years but there is no hard evidence to answer all of these questions.

We must study the waterways near us including the ocean, the temperature, the currents, pollution, cycles, etc. I’ve been researching this more lately as I see the piles of sargassum collecting on the beaches due to these last two tropical storms. Do you spend time on the ocean? Have you ever run into sargassum (I guess that you probably have if you spend any time on the ocean)? If you live near a beach does it pile up on your beaches? Is it mostly in the summertime or do you see it year-round?