A Primeval Tide of Toxins

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"Once it gets going, it's able to sustain itself," O'Neil said. We stoke the ocean with energy streaming off the land, he said, and with no clear pathways up the food chain, this energy fuels an explosion of microbial growth. A reduced snowpack from higher temperatures is accelerating river discharges and thus plankton blooms. Los Angeles Times: A Primeval Tide of Toxins 01/25/2007 04:20 PM http://www. William Dennison, then director of the University of Queensland botany lab, couldn't believe it at first. Along the Spanish coast, jellyfish swarm so thick that nets are strung to protect swimmers from their sting. When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Perhaps its most diabolical trick is its ability to feed on itself. To feed the farmed stocks, menhaden, sardines and anchovies are harvested in great quantities, ground up and processed into pellets. Scientists say it produces more than 100 toxins, probably as a defense mechanism. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos. Aboriginal fishermen had spotted the weed in small patches years earlier, but it had moved into new parts of the bay and was growing like never before. Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, has spent most of her career peering into waters that resemble those of the distant past. Like other scientists, Jeremy Jackson, 63, was slow to perceive this latest shift in the biological order. These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria. The Key has now slipped below the water's surface, a disappearing act likely to be repeated elsewhere in these waters as pounding waves breach dying reefs. As the depletion of fish allows the lowest forms of life to run rampant, said Pauly, it is "transforming the oceans into a microbial soup. He now sees that the quiet creep of environmental decay, occurring largely unnoticed over many years, had drastically altered the ocean. Dive-shop operators scrub the bronze statue with wire brushes from time to time, but they have trouble keeping up with the growth. Organisms such as the fireweed that torments the fishermen of Moreton Bay have been around for eons