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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I am an expert. And ya, the “parent group”, sure, but we all have common ancestors though. So by that line of reasoning, I guess you are a plant?
Anyway ya plants evolved from protists. What other groups of organisms do we lump together based on an 19th century understanding of the world? I am amazed by people’s ability to warp the world to their priors rather be bothered to update them.
> What other groups of organisms do we lump together based on an 19th century understanding of the world?
Ooo, I know this one! Fish! Also, trees.
People love to annoy people with the fun fact that palms aren't true trees, but are actually grasses (hell, grass probably is one too), as if tree doesn't just mean "Fairly rigid plant that will usually grow taller than humans." It's useful to have words to describe categories of organisms based on how they appear to us and their relationship to us (say, "gut flora"), even if they don't describe coherent clades.
Sometimes it's important to know that a screwdriver was developed separately from a hammer and really has a very different purpose and theory behind it, and sometimes it's important to know that they both go in the toolbox because they're both things you hold and use on other things to attach things together.
My hot take is that just because a term develops a more specific, scientific definition doesn't mean that the existing colloquial definition is wrong, it's just a different use of the word. It's ok for you to disagree with that, but it's strange that you're so very dismissive of the idea.
Your friends’ botany joke is lame. Tree was never taxonomical, only a growth form or “habit” in older parlance. Plenty of individual species grow as trees or shrubs and many genera have representatives from forb through tree. There is no true tree.
The thing is if all you know is that the screwdriver and hammer go in the toolbox, you lack a functional knowledge of those tools and therefore the skill to use them. I for one am confident that you are capable of understanding that while plants and algae are both living organisms, they are functionally, ecologically, evolutionarily, and taxonomically different. The layperson so married to their colloquialisms need not worry about too much detail, yet may benefit from the knowledge that algae are not for bashing nails and plants are not for driving screws. Alas you may wish to know which of the sea you may eat raw or which might seasonally give you a nut flour. Or you may more easily grasp the functional and ecological role of microalgae, armed with the background understanding of their distinction from trees and grasses, should you encounter those creatures. And I hope you do, since you are relying on them to live.
In any case, in my experience, the greater people’s understanding of natural history and their ability to name the organisms in their environment, the more likely they are to see, appreciate, and value the rich mosaic if life around them. The benefits of that are grand for the individual even if they don’t bother connecting the dots on the science.
Colloquialisms are great. But suggesting we all permanently adopt and maintain a state of ignorance because a certain subset of humans had a term, I dunno.
"Tetrapods are descended from fish, so in a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group that includes all vertebrates except tetrapods. To treat fish as a monophyletic group, one would have to classify tetrapods as a clade/subgroup of specialized fish, which would make "fish" and "vertebrates" synonyms."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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?
"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.."
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.
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.
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.
A picture I took yesterday on the beach in Tulum,
https://imgur.com/a/HkYhIhx
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...
https://archive.ph/VubVx
NOAA's reporting tool
https://research.noaa.gov/noaa-sargassum-tool-now-provides-d...
who knew runoff from tons of fertilizer and adding load of CO2 to the oceans would grow plants
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.
If you’re going to make snarky vacuous comments, it’d help to get your biology right. Sargassum is algae, not a plant.
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.
And EU-bureaucratically, a carrot is a fruit, because of some odd Portuguese product.
Yeah, the best way to put it that I've seen is that tomatoes are botanically fruits, but culinarily vegetables.
In fact, "vegetable" is not a botanical term at all
Algae aren't plants?! I guess I need to dive back into taxonomy.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I am an expert. And ya, the “parent group”, sure, but we all have common ancestors though. So by that line of reasoning, I guess you are a plant?
Anyway ya plants evolved from protists. What other groups of organisms do we lump together based on an 19th century understanding of the world? I am amazed by people’s ability to warp the world to their priors rather be bothered to update them.
> What other groups of organisms do we lump together based on an 19th century understanding of the world?
Ooo, I know this one! Fish! Also, trees.
People love to annoy people with the fun fact that palms aren't true trees, but are actually grasses (hell, grass probably is one too), as if tree doesn't just mean "Fairly rigid plant that will usually grow taller than humans." It's useful to have words to describe categories of organisms based on how they appear to us and their relationship to us (say, "gut flora"), even if they don't describe coherent clades.
Sometimes it's important to know that a screwdriver was developed separately from a hammer and really has a very different purpose and theory behind it, and sometimes it's important to know that they both go in the toolbox because they're both things you hold and use on other things to attach things together.
My hot take is that just because a term develops a more specific, scientific definition doesn't mean that the existing colloquial definition is wrong, it's just a different use of the word. It's ok for you to disagree with that, but it's strange that you're so very dismissive of the idea.
Your friends’ botany joke is lame. Tree was never taxonomical, only a growth form or “habit” in older parlance. Plenty of individual species grow as trees or shrubs and many genera have representatives from forb through tree. There is no true tree.
The thing is if all you know is that the screwdriver and hammer go in the toolbox, you lack a functional knowledge of those tools and therefore the skill to use them. I for one am confident that you are capable of understanding that while plants and algae are both living organisms, they are functionally, ecologically, evolutionarily, and taxonomically different. The layperson so married to their colloquialisms need not worry about too much detail, yet may benefit from the knowledge that algae are not for bashing nails and plants are not for driving screws. Alas you may wish to know which of the sea you may eat raw or which might seasonally give you a nut flour. Or you may more easily grasp the functional and ecological role of microalgae, armed with the background understanding of their distinction from trees and grasses, should you encounter those creatures. And I hope you do, since you are relying on them to live.
In any case, in my experience, the greater people’s understanding of natural history and their ability to name the organisms in their environment, the more likely they are to see, appreciate, and value the rich mosaic if life around them. The benefits of that are grand for the individual even if they don’t bother connecting the dots on the science.
Colloquialisms are great. But suggesting we all permanently adopt and maintain a state of ignorance because a certain subset of humans had a term, I dunno.
What’s the fish one?
>What’s the fish one?
To again quote Wikipedia,
"Tetrapods are descended from fish, so in a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group that includes all vertebrates except tetrapods. To treat fish as a monophyletic group, one would have to classify tetrapods as a clade/subgroup of specialized fish, which would make "fish" and "vertebrates" synonyms."
Yes, you're right algae produce way more oxygen than plants.
I know Bill Gates thinks planting trees is a waste of time, but are the oceans doing this task for him?
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.
Is the title a take on the Neuromancer intro?
It's an actual quote from the article, but yes, that is an evocative reference.
The ocean next to the port city was the color of chocolate; congealing in a stone molcajete...
The ocean under the port was the color of television, tuned to a cooking show about chocolate.
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.
I lived in Cancun 10 years ago and this was already a huge issue back then.
while sargassum is a bane for beaches, corals, and tourist industries, it's a big boon for ocean life far off the coast.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargassum#Sustainable_uses
Find a way to lower salt & arsenic content, and it could be an excellent fertilizer.
Currently no good use for it other than as a Biochar. Come up with a solution and save billions for the tourism industry.
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
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...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
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.
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!
If the US was doing it, we'd only need a Little Excursion against Seaweed!
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.
...lasting most of a decade.
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.
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.
"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.
Sounds like we need a War on "War on X"-headlines.
Tangent - The War On Drugs is an excellent band.
They’re gonna kill the whole ocean and conquer it in its entirety. Any resistance by the ocean will be futile!
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?
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In the article they did send the navy.
When the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
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.
I lost my best friend to the War on Christmas. His body came home stuffed with pine needles and partridge feathers.
"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.."
Do not give this administration any ideas, after all Caligula ordered his legions to wade out and attack the waves with swords.
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.
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the US has summoned the ambassador of Seaweed to answer for this
our chocolate shortage is dire!
The big answer is not some "war on..." But instead "how can we eat it?" Or "Can it be reprocessed into something useful?"
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.
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.
As Close04 mentioned, sargassum accumulates arsenic. You can't eat it or use it as fertilizer without poisoning.
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.
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Is your political flamebait account going well?
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.
Outside of my power, but super interesting. Maybe you should continue?
>As a tactic though it's a bit like tracers, they work in both directions.
False. You cannot see who downvotes your posts.
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