Scraping the smelly sargassum seaweed from some beaches on Mexico’s resort-strewn Caribbean coast has become not only a nightmare, but a possible health threat, for the workers doing it — with the amounts washed ashore this year amounting to mountains no embankments. The decay of sargassum, which is actually seaweed, produces hydrogen sulfide gas. In small quantities in open spaces, it is no more than an annoying smell: sulphurous, like rotten eggs. But in the quantities seen in once-paradise beach towns like Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Xcalak, scientists say it can be dangerous for workers with respiratory problems as they harvest the algae without masks in the scorching heat. This year looks set to be even worse than the peak sargassum year of 2018. Ezequiel Martinez Lara is one of thousands of workers who work six to eight hours a day, cramming piles of sargassum into forklift trucks and then transporting them from the beach to a growing pile on a neighboring street. Martinez Lara used to earn up to $50 a day guiding anglers on trips, but now makes less than half that for harvesting about 40 cartloads of sargassum each day. It’s a Sisyphean work on a beach north of Tulum, where huge kelp mats float just out in the open sea. “If we clean it all today, tomorrow more will be washed,” said another worker, Austin Valle. But workers like Martinez and Valle are exposed to more than just the scorching sun, says Rosa Rodriguez Martinez, a biologist in the coastal city of Puerto Morelos who studies reefs and coastal ecosystems for the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “At the university we have started to measure the amount of gas that sargassum produces when we scrape it,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “At one point (in a decaying seaweed pile) it reached 56 parts per million. That’s very high. Above two, that can be dangerous for people with respiratory problems.” “I ran away” from the scene, he said. Martinez Lara cannot afford to avoid hydrogen sulfide gas. Like almost every other sargassum worker on the coast, he has no mask, gas sensor or medical care. He works with a daily rate for the person who owns the house in front of the beach. “When sargassum rots, it gives off a very strong acid-like smell and it’s very annoying when you breathe it in; it hurts a lot,” Martinez Lara said. He said he takes simpler precautions. “We’re trying to clear it off (the beach) as quickly as possible … to get it out when it’s as fresh as possible,” he says. A 2019 article in the Journal of Travel Medicine includes the alarming warning: “More chronic exposure to these gases can lead to conjunctival and neurocognitive symptoms such as memory loss and balance disorder, as well as non-specific symptoms such as headache, nausea and fatigue. .” The Florida Department of Health, on the other hand, says that “hydrogen sulfide levels in an area such as a beach, where large amounts of air flow can dilute the levels, are not expected to harm health.” The sargassum problem is not as bad for tourists as it is for workers. But it’s not pleasant either. Ligia Collado-Vides, a marine botanist at Florida International University who specializes in the study of macroalgae such as sargassum, said: “If you swim for a while, it shouldn’t be a danger at all,” but added that the tiny jellyfish cousins known as hydrozoa inhabit often on sargassum mats. “If you’re going to be out there for a long time playing in the sargassum, you can get many, many, many stings from hydrozoa, and those are toxic,” he noted, adding that long sleeves — something almost no one wears to the beach — can to help. Sarah Callaway, a tourist from Denver, Colorado, was limited to playing with her children in the pool in front of their rented beach house. “The property is beautiful, but we were automatically hit … by the smell,” Callaway said. “The smell is really pungent and very strong. And then, yes, we were disappointed with how much sargassum there is here.” “The kids tried to go into the ocean, but then they get overwhelmed by it. So we really haven’t been able to do the beach part, which is why we came,” he said. It will also affect local people who depend on the tourist trade. Hundreds of thousands of people have migrated to the coast in recent years for better-paying jobs, but some may now be considering leaving. Valle, the seaweed scavenger, said one of his friends in Tulum is considering giving up her snack business because sales have dropped so much. It is difficult to measure the impact on tourism. The Caribbean coast saw a drop in visits during the coronavirus pandemic, but because Mexico never declared travel restrictions, testing requirements or mandatory mask rules, Americans kept coming. International tourism to the country as a whole surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2022, with 10.26 million visitors from January to June, 1.5% higher than the 10.11 million tourists who arrived in Mexico in first half of 2019. Mexico’s strongest showing was with US tourists. The number of Americans who arrived by air in the first half of 2022 was 6.66 million. i.e. by 19.1% higher than the corresponding period of 2019. But that boom may be slowing. Grupo Financiero Base noted in a research report that international tourist arrivals in June 2022 were down 13.8% from levels in June 2019. It’s unclear what — sargassum, inflation or the war in Ukraine — might be to blame. caused this decline. And overall tourism spending remains below pre-pandemic levels. The picture is mixed because some of the more developed resorts like Cancun have not suffered as much from the sargassum as the more toned down resorts further south like Playa del Carmen and Tulum. Ocean currents and islands like Isla Mujeres shield Cancun from much of the floating sargassum. Given the large number of large hotels in Cancun with huge cleaning staff and money to deploy floating booms, what sargassum arrives is cleaned faster. The jury is still out on the floating booms, which are meant to trap the sargassum mats at sea before they reach the beach. “When the sea is calm, all kinds of booms work,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “When there are waves, none of them work.” Some tourists like the area so much that they keep coming back. “I’ll definitely be back. We love it here,” said Jeff Chambers, a tourist from Palm Desert, California, who was walking along the main beach road in Tulum. “We like things a little slower.” Some locals like Victor Reyes, who works in real estate in Tulum, are more optimistic about the algae, noting that it’s not as bad in the winter months. “In winter it’s better. In November, when the tourists want to come, the sargassum is gone,” says Reyes. As bad as sargassum is for humans — and Collado-Vides stresses that much more study is needed — it’s much worse for seagrass, fish and other marine life that suffocate from algae that sink to the bottom, decompose and they create oxygen-deficient or anoxic layers similar to dead zones. “Sargassum stays there and goes down in the water column so you can’t see it, but at the bottom it creates anoxic conditions,” he said. Recounting a recent monitoring mission, Collado-Vides said: “It’s really terrible… the amount of vertebrates, the amount of crabs, the amount of fish that died in a quadrant of just 1 square meter.”
title: “Mexico Seaweed Mountains Grow On Beaches Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-25” author: “Patrick Domingues”
Scraping the smelly sargassum seaweed from some beaches on Mexico’s resort-strewn Caribbean coast has become not only a nightmare, but a possible health threat, for the workers doing it — with the amounts washed ashore this year amounting to mountains no embankments. The decay of sargassum, which is actually seaweed, produces hydrogen sulfide gas. In small quantities in open spaces, it is no more than an annoying smell: sulphurous, like rotten eggs. But in the quantities seen in once-paradise beach towns like Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Xcalak, scientists say it can be dangerous for workers with respiratory problems as they harvest the algae without masks in the scorching heat. This year looks set to be even worse than the peak sargassum year of 2018. Ezequiel Martinez Lara is one of thousands of workers who work six to eight hours a day, cramming piles of sargassum into forklift trucks and then transporting them from the beach to a growing pile on a neighboring street. Martinez Lara used to earn up to $50 a day guiding anglers on trips, but now makes less than half that for harvesting about 40 cartloads of sargassum each day. It’s a Sisyphean work on a beach north of Tulum, where huge kelp mats float just out in the open sea. “If we clean it all today, tomorrow more will be washed,” said another worker, Austin Valle. But workers like Martinez and Valle are exposed to more than just the scorching sun, says Rosa Rodriguez Martinez, a biologist in the coastal city of Puerto Morelos who studies reefs and coastal ecosystems for the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “At the university we have started to measure the amount of gas that sargassum produces when we scrape it,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “At one point (in a decaying seaweed pile) it reached 56 parts per million. That’s very high. Above two, that can be dangerous for people with respiratory problems.” “I ran away” from the scene, he said. Martinez Lara cannot afford to avoid hydrogen sulfide gas. Like almost every other sargassum worker on the coast, he has no mask, gas sensor or medical care. He works with a daily rate for the person who owns the house in front of the beach. “When sargassum rots, it gives off a very strong acid-like smell and it’s very annoying when you breathe it in; it hurts a lot,” Martinez Lara said. He said he takes simpler precautions. “We’re trying to clear it off (the beach) as quickly as possible … to get it out when it’s as fresh as possible,” he says. A 2019 article in the Journal of Travel Medicine includes the alarming warning: “More chronic exposure to these gases can lead to conjunctival and neurocognitive symptoms such as memory loss and balance disorder, as well as non-specific symptoms such as headache, nausea and fatigue. .” The Florida Department of Health, on the other hand, says that “hydrogen sulfide levels in an area such as a beach, where large amounts of air flow can dilute the levels, are not expected to harm health.” The sargassum problem is not as bad for tourists as it is for workers. But it’s not pleasant either. Ligia Collado-Vides, a marine botanist at Florida International University who specializes in the study of macroalgae such as sargassum, said: “If you swim for a while, it shouldn’t be a danger at all,” but added that the tiny jellyfish cousins known as hydrozoa inhabit often on sargassum mats. “If you’re going to be out there for a long time playing in the sargassum, you can get many, many, many stings from hydrozoa, and those are toxic,” he noted, adding that long sleeves — something almost no one wears to the beach — can to help. Sarah Callaway, a tourist from Denver, Colorado, was limited to playing with her children in the pool in front of their rented beach house. “The property is beautiful, but we were automatically hit … by the smell,” Callaway said. “The smell is really pungent and very strong. And then, yes, we were disappointed with how much sargassum there is here.” “The kids tried to go into the ocean, but then they get overwhelmed by it. So we really haven’t been able to do the beach part, which is why we came,” he said. It will also affect local people who depend on the tourist trade. Hundreds of thousands of people have migrated to the coast in recent years for better-paying jobs, but some may now be considering leaving. Valle, the seaweed scavenger, said one of his friends in Tulum is considering giving up her snack business because sales have dropped so much. It is difficult to measure the impact on tourism. The Caribbean coast saw a drop in visits during the coronavirus pandemic, but because Mexico never declared travel restrictions, testing requirements or mandatory mask rules, Americans kept coming. International tourism to the country as a whole surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2022, with 10.26 million visitors from January to June, 1.5% higher than the 10.11 million tourists who arrived in Mexico in first half of 2019. Mexico’s strongest showing was with US tourists. The number of Americans who arrived by air in the first half of 2022 was 6.66 million. i.e. by 19.1% higher than the corresponding period of 2019. But that boom may be slowing. Grupo Financiero Base noted in a research report that international tourist arrivals in June 2022 were down 13.8% from levels in June 2019. It’s unclear what — sargassum, inflation or the war in Ukraine — might be to blame. caused this decline. And overall tourism spending remains below pre-pandemic levels. The picture is mixed because some of the more developed resorts like Cancun have not suffered as much from the sargassum as the more toned down resorts further south like Playa del Carmen and Tulum. Ocean currents and islands like Isla Mujeres shield Cancun from much of the floating sargassum. Given the large number of large hotels in Cancun with huge cleaning staff and money to deploy floating booms, what sargassum arrives is cleaned faster. The jury is still out on the floating booms, which are meant to trap the sargassum mats at sea before they reach the beach. “When the sea is calm, all kinds of booms work,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “When there are waves, none of them work.” Some tourists like the area so much that they keep coming back. “I’ll definitely be back. We love it here,” said Jeff Chambers, a tourist from Palm Desert, California, who was walking along the main beach road in Tulum. “We like things a little slower.” Some locals like Victor Reyes, who works in real estate in Tulum, are more optimistic about the algae, noting that it’s not as bad in the winter months. “In winter it’s better. In November, when the tourists want to come, the sargassum is gone,” says Reyes. As bad as sargassum is for humans — and Collado-Vides stresses that much more study is needed — it’s much worse for seagrass, fish and other marine life that suffocate from algae that sink to the bottom, decompose and they create oxygen-deficient or anoxic layers similar to dead zones. “Sargassum stays there and goes down in the water column so you can’t see it, but at the bottom it creates anoxic conditions,” he said. Recounting a recent monitoring mission, Collado-Vides said: “It’s really terrible… the amount of vertebrates, the amount of crabs, the amount of fish that died in a quadrant of just 1 square meter.”
title: “Mexico Seaweed Mountains Grow On Beaches Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-03” author: “John Nest”
Scraping the smelly sargassum seaweed from some beaches on Mexico’s resort-strewn Caribbean coast has become not only a nightmare, but a possible health threat, for the workers doing it — with the amounts washed ashore this year amounting to mountains no embankments. The decay of sargassum, which is actually seaweed, produces hydrogen sulfide gas. In small quantities in open spaces, it is no more than an annoying smell: sulphurous, like rotten eggs. But in the quantities seen in once-paradise beach towns like Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Xcalak, scientists say it can be dangerous for workers with respiratory problems as they harvest the algae without masks in the scorching heat. This year looks set to be even worse than the peak sargassum year of 2018. Ezequiel Martinez Lara is one of thousands of workers who work six to eight hours a day, cramming piles of sargassum into forklift trucks and then transporting them from the beach to a growing pile on a neighboring street. Martinez Lara used to earn up to $50 a day guiding anglers on trips, but now makes less than half that for harvesting about 40 cartloads of sargassum each day. It’s a Sisyphean work on a beach north of Tulum, where huge kelp mats float just out in the open sea. “If we clean it all today, tomorrow more will be washed,” said another worker, Austin Valle. But workers like Martinez and Valle are exposed to more than just the scorching sun, says Rosa Rodriguez Martinez, a biologist in the coastal city of Puerto Morelos who studies reefs and coastal ecosystems for the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “At the university we have started to measure the amount of gas that sargassum produces when we scrape it,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “At one point (in a decaying seaweed pile) it reached 56 parts per million. That’s very high. Above two, that can be dangerous for people with respiratory problems.” “I ran away” from the scene, he said. Martinez Lara cannot afford to avoid hydrogen sulfide gas. Like almost every other sargassum worker on the coast, he has no mask, gas sensor or medical care. He works with a daily rate for the person who owns the house in front of the beach. “When sargassum rots, it gives off a very strong acid-like smell and it’s very annoying when you breathe it in; it hurts a lot,” Martinez Lara said. He said he takes simpler precautions. “We’re trying to clear it off (the beach) as quickly as possible … to get it out when it’s as fresh as possible,” he says. A 2019 article in the Journal of Travel Medicine includes the alarming warning: “More chronic exposure to these gases can lead to conjunctival and neurocognitive symptoms such as memory loss and balance disorder, as well as non-specific symptoms such as headache, nausea and fatigue. .” The Florida Department of Health, on the other hand, says that “hydrogen sulfide levels in an area such as a beach, where large amounts of air flow can dilute the levels, are not expected to harm health.” The sargassum problem is not as bad for tourists as it is for workers. But it’s not pleasant either. Ligia Collado-Vides, a marine botanist at Florida International University who specializes in the study of macroalgae such as sargassum, said: “If you swim for a while, it shouldn’t be a danger at all,” but added that the tiny jellyfish cousins known as hydrozoa inhabit often on sargassum mats. “If you’re going to be out there for a long time playing in the sargassum, you can get many, many, many stings from hydrozoa, and those are toxic,” he noted, adding that long sleeves — something almost no one wears to the beach — can to help. Sarah Callaway, a tourist from Denver, Colorado, was limited to playing with her children in the pool in front of their rented beach house. “The property is beautiful, but we were automatically hit … by the smell,” Callaway said. “The smell is really pungent and very strong. And then, yes, we were disappointed with how much sargassum there is here.” “The kids tried to go into the ocean, but then they get overwhelmed by it. So we really haven’t been able to do the beach part, which is why we came,” he said. It will also affect local people who depend on the tourist trade. Hundreds of thousands of people have migrated to the coast in recent years for better-paying jobs, but some may now be considering leaving. Valle, the seaweed scavenger, said one of his friends in Tulum is considering giving up her snack business because sales have dropped so much. It is difficult to measure the impact on tourism. The Caribbean coast saw a drop in visits during the coronavirus pandemic, but because Mexico never declared travel restrictions, testing requirements or mandatory mask rules, Americans kept coming. International tourism to the country as a whole surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2022, with 10.26 million visitors from January to June, 1.5% higher than the 10.11 million tourists who arrived in Mexico in first half of 2019. Mexico’s strongest showing was with US tourists. The number of Americans who arrived by air in the first half of 2022 was 6.66 million. i.e. by 19.1% higher than the corresponding period of 2019. But that boom may be slowing. Grupo Financiero Base noted in a research report that international tourist arrivals in June 2022 were down 13.8% from levels in June 2019. It’s unclear what — sargassum, inflation or the war in Ukraine — might be to blame. caused this decline. And overall tourism spending remains below pre-pandemic levels. The picture is mixed because some of the more developed resorts like Cancun have not suffered as much from the sargassum as the more toned down resorts further south like Playa del Carmen and Tulum. Ocean currents and islands like Isla Mujeres shield Cancun from much of the floating sargassum. Given the large number of large hotels in Cancun with huge cleaning staff and money to deploy floating booms, what sargassum arrives is cleaned faster. The jury is still out on the floating booms, which are meant to trap the sargassum mats at sea before they reach the beach. “When the sea is calm, all kinds of booms work,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “When there are waves, none of them work.” Some tourists like the area so much that they keep coming back. “I’ll definitely be back. We love it here,” said Jeff Chambers, a tourist from Palm Desert, California, who was walking along the main beach road in Tulum. “We like things a little slower.” Some locals like Victor Reyes, who works in real estate in Tulum, are more optimistic about the algae, noting that it’s not as bad in the winter months. “In winter it’s better. In November, when the tourists want to come, the sargassum is gone,” says Reyes. As bad as sargassum is for humans — and Collado-Vides stresses that much more study is needed — it’s much worse for seagrass, fish and other marine life that suffocate from algae that sink to the bottom, decompose and they create oxygen-deficient or anoxic layers similar to dead zones. “Sargassum stays there and goes down in the water column so you can’t see it, but at the bottom it creates anoxic conditions,” he said. Recounting a recent monitoring mission, Collado-Vides said: “It’s really terrible… the amount of vertebrates, the amount of crabs, the amount of fish that died in a quadrant of just 1 square meter.”
title: “Mexico Seaweed Mountains Grow On Beaches Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Freddie Borges”
Scraping the smelly sargassum seaweed from some beaches on Mexico’s resort-strewn Caribbean coast has become not only a nightmare, but a possible health threat, for the workers doing it — with the amounts washed ashore this year amounting to mountains no embankments. The decay of sargassum, which is actually seaweed, produces hydrogen sulfide gas. In small quantities in open spaces, it is no more than an annoying smell: sulphurous, like rotten eggs. But in the quantities seen in once-paradise beach towns like Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Xcalak, scientists say it can be dangerous for workers with respiratory problems as they harvest the algae without masks in the scorching heat. This year looks set to be even worse than the peak sargassum year of 2018. Ezequiel Martinez Lara is one of thousands of workers who work six to eight hours a day, cramming piles of sargassum into forklift trucks and then transporting them from the beach to a growing pile on a neighboring street. Martinez Lara used to earn up to $50 a day guiding anglers on trips, but now makes less than half that for harvesting about 40 cartloads of sargassum each day. It’s a Sisyphean work on a beach north of Tulum, where huge kelp mats float just out in the open sea. “If we clean it all today, tomorrow more will be washed,” said another worker, Austin Valle. But workers like Martinez and Valle are exposed to more than just the scorching sun, says Rosa Rodriguez Martinez, a biologist in the coastal city of Puerto Morelos who studies reefs and coastal ecosystems for the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “At the university we have started to measure the amount of gas that sargassum produces when we scrape it,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “At one point (in a decaying seaweed pile) it reached 56 parts per million. That’s very high. Above two, that can be dangerous for people with respiratory problems.” “I ran away” from the scene, he said. Martinez Lara cannot afford to avoid hydrogen sulfide gas. Like almost every other sargassum worker on the coast, he has no mask, gas sensor or medical care. He works with a daily rate for the person who owns the house in front of the beach. “When sargassum rots, it gives off a very strong acid-like smell and it’s very annoying when you breathe it in; it hurts a lot,” Martinez Lara said. He said he takes simpler precautions. “We’re trying to clear it off (the beach) as quickly as possible … to get it out when it’s as fresh as possible,” he says. A 2019 article in the Journal of Travel Medicine includes the alarming warning: “More chronic exposure to these gases can lead to conjunctival and neurocognitive symptoms such as memory loss and balance disorder, as well as non-specific symptoms such as headache, nausea and fatigue. .” The Florida Department of Health, on the other hand, says that “hydrogen sulfide levels in an area such as a beach, where large amounts of air flow can dilute the levels, are not expected to harm health.” The sargassum problem is not as bad for tourists as it is for workers. But it’s not pleasant either. Ligia Collado-Vides, a marine botanist at Florida International University who specializes in the study of macroalgae such as sargassum, said: “If you swim for a while, it shouldn’t be a danger at all,” but added that the tiny jellyfish cousins known as hydrozoa inhabit often on sargassum mats. “If you’re going to be out there for a long time playing in the sargassum, you can get many, many, many stings from hydrozoa, and those are toxic,” he noted, adding that long sleeves — something almost no one wears to the beach — can to help. Sarah Callaway, a tourist from Denver, Colorado, was limited to playing with her children in the pool in front of their rented beach house. “The property is beautiful, but we were automatically hit … by the smell,” Callaway said. “The smell is really pungent and very strong. And then, yes, we were disappointed with how much sargassum there is here.” “The kids tried to go into the ocean, but then they get overwhelmed by it. So we really haven’t been able to do the beach part, which is why we came,” he said. It will also affect local people who depend on the tourist trade. Hundreds of thousands of people have migrated to the coast in recent years for better-paying jobs, but some may now be considering leaving. Valle, the seaweed scavenger, said one of his friends in Tulum is considering giving up her snack business because sales have dropped so much. It is difficult to measure the impact on tourism. The Caribbean coast saw a drop in visits during the coronavirus pandemic, but because Mexico never declared travel restrictions, testing requirements or mandatory mask rules, Americans kept coming. International tourism to the country as a whole surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2022, with 10.26 million visitors from January to June, 1.5% higher than the 10.11 million tourists who arrived in Mexico in first half of 2019. Mexico’s strongest showing was with US tourists. The number of Americans who arrived by air in the first half of 2022 was 6.66 million. i.e. by 19.1% higher than the corresponding period of 2019. But that boom may be slowing. Grupo Financiero Base noted in a research report that international tourist arrivals in June 2022 were down 13.8% from levels in June 2019. It’s unclear what — sargassum, inflation or the war in Ukraine — might be to blame. caused this decline. And overall tourism spending remains below pre-pandemic levels. The picture is mixed because some of the more developed resorts like Cancun have not suffered as much from the sargassum as the more toned down resorts further south like Playa del Carmen and Tulum. Ocean currents and islands like Isla Mujeres shield Cancun from much of the floating sargassum. Given the large number of large hotels in Cancun with huge cleaning staff and money to deploy floating booms, what sargassum arrives is cleaned faster. The jury is still out on the floating booms, which are meant to trap the sargassum mats at sea before they reach the beach. “When the sea is calm, all kinds of booms work,” Rodriguez Martinez said. “When there are waves, none of them work.” Some tourists like the area so much that they keep coming back. “I’ll definitely be back. We love it here,” said Jeff Chambers, a tourist from Palm Desert, California, who was walking along the main beach road in Tulum. “We like things a little slower.” Some locals like Victor Reyes, who works in real estate in Tulum, are more optimistic about the algae, noting that it’s not as bad in the winter months. “In winter it’s better. In November, when the tourists want to come, the sargassum is gone,” says Reyes. As bad as sargassum is for humans — and Collado-Vides stresses that much more study is needed — it’s much worse for seagrass, fish and other marine life that suffocate from algae that sink to the bottom, decompose and they create oxygen-deficient or anoxic layers similar to dead zones. “Sargassum stays there and goes down in the water column so you can’t see it, but at the bottom it creates anoxic conditions,” he said. Recounting a recent monitoring mission, Collado-Vides said: “It’s really terrible… the amount of vertebrates, the amount of crabs, the amount of fish that died in a quadrant of just 1 square meter.”
