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New horror revealed in sargassum blob
- pmontra 3y agoIt reminds me of the algae in Benford's Timescape novel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape
- turtleyacht 3y agoOf course, nature wins again: paperclip maximization from flesh-eating bacteria adapted to plastic.
- throwawaymaths 3y agoSome context: Vibrio and pseudomonas have long been known to be able to consume hydrocarbons and derivates. Not all vibrio or pseudomonads are pathogenic, much less flesh eating, only some of them.
- masklinn 3y agoYep, and given plastic is useful but pretty stable you’d expect adaptation to plastic would lead to discarding other niches. Like flesh-eating.
- throwawaymaths 3y agoYou'd think but biology often comes up with stochastic surprises.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- XorNot 3y ago"flesh eating" is also pretty relative with bacteria. What's talked about as "flesh eating" is common bacteria that have infected an uncommon part of the body - namely when the infection gets into intercellular tissue space.
- namaria 3y agoThe ape pattern is proving self destructive.
- echelon 3y agoNo it's not. Don't be a misanthrope. Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better for most of us on average. Be glad we're not an icy hellscape like Pluto. Or that we don't not exist.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoOn average. But the median is falling.
- ok_dad 3y agoPointing out humanity's flaws isn't being a misanthrope, we should strive not to fuck up our planet. Things are usually on an upwards trajectory, until they are not. When I have a company that is growing, there had better be some sustainability there, right? Today, there is some evidence that humanity's improvements used the environment as leverage, and the debt may have come due without the customer base to support it. edit: removed mixed metaphors
- throwway120385 3y agoPluto is a pretty low bar.
- skyechurch 3y agoI'm so old I remember when Pluto was a planet, as good as Jupiter or any of them. Now, it's just a punch line.
- throwway120385 3y agoA cold, cold dwarf planet.
- Avshalom 3y ago
- DarkNova6 3y agoThat is a pretty horrifying prospect > “Another interesting thing we discovered is a set of genes called ‘zot’ genes, which causes leaky gut syndrome,” said Mincer. “If a fish eats a piece of plastic and gets infected by this Vibrio, which then results in a leaky gut and diarrhoea, it’s going to release waste nutrients such nitrogen and phosphate that could stimulate sargassum growth and other surrounding organisms.”
- ricksunny 3y agoNot sure I understand that particular concern of the researcher's - in the absence of such a development, what would you suppose happens to nitrogen & phosphorus that had been hitherto sequestered in the fish's body structure once it completes its lifecycle / becomes dinner for a bigger fish? Does it stay in progressively bigger fish species' biomass, forever? Do the fish ordinarily migrate away from the sargassum as they finish their lifecycle, depositing their bioaccumulated nitrogen & phophorus elsewhere?
- dflock 3y agoThey either get eaten, or fall to the ocean floor, ~4,000m down.
- DoctorOetker 3y agoThen all those dead floating fish I and others have seen, mostly in pictures, but sometimes in real life must have been a grand collective illusion? I wonder what the terminal velocity of a dead, but not yet inflating, fish would be. I presume it would be only marginally heavier then water, with quite a lot of friction in water. If they didn't get recycled in the bio-sphere, and didn't float I'd expect pictures of the ocean floor to look like a weird nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch painting of a thick layer of dead but intact fish.
- dflock 3y agoDepending on where and how they die, dead fish float briefly because of gas created by bacterial decay, but sink after a rupture, or a few days. Many dead fish will get eaten as they fall through the water column. Things that sink all that way to the bottom of the ocean do still get recycled by the biosphere - but the biosphere at the bottom, which is only connected tenuously and very slowly with the surface - most of the carbon etc... will stay down there for a very long time. > I'd expect pictures of the ocean floor to look like a weird nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch painting of a thick layer of dead but intact fish. Not intact for long, because the seafloor has lots of scavengers, but yes, this is pretty accurate - see Whalefall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall and Marine Snow: > About three-quarters of the deep ocean floor is covered in this thick, smooth ooze. The ooze collects as much as six meters every million years. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/marinesnow.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/marinesnow.html
- hirundo 3y agoA bacterium that can metabolize plastic, which is notoriously difficult to recycle, could be a biodegrading symbiote as well as a pathogen.
- thatguy0900 3y agoWould really suck to have flesh eating bacteria thriving on basically everything in the world though.
- roundandround 3y agoSounds like a variant on the 12 monkeys theme.
- owenmarshall 3y agoFunny, my mind immediately went to Vonnegut. > There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes - and all the sea was ice-nine.
- pas 3y agofinally, time to build the caves of steel!
- masklinn 3y agoUsually there’s a limited amount of genetic material to leverage. If a bacteria adapts to eating plastic, you’d expect the rest to start degrading as it becomes unnecessary, and can be recycled to better plastic eating.
- BizarroLand 3y agoGoing to be interesting that our great grandkids will have to deal with plastic rusting.
- yes_man 3y ago
- phkahler 3y agoHey, can we gather that blob, dry it, and burn it as fuel?
- twelve40 3y agothey do that with a fraction of it, but it's 5500 miles long (twice the width of the continental US for comparison) so yeah...
- dylan604 3y agowhy is that a deterrent? just cut down into smaller size chunks just like we poke the earth full of holes to leak out the oil instead of sucking it out in one go.
- twelve40 3y agolikely because it costs a ton of money? but maybe is simply hasn't occurred to anyone who lives there for the last 10 years
- munificent 3y agoLove that you used "just" twice to equate something to as much effort as the building and operation of the entire petroleum industry.
- pavlov 3y agoBurning biomass isn’t ideal when we’re dealing with an atmospheric CO2 crisis. Maybe we should instead try to accelerate the blob’s growth so it would absorb more CO2.
- phkahler 3y ago>> Burning biomass isn’t ideal when we’re dealing with an atmospheric CO2 crisis. But it might offset other carbon based fuels. I was just trying to think of a use for that massive blob to get rid of it. CO2 may be a threat down the road, but what if this blob chokes the oceans in 3 to 5 years? It's growing fast.
- ahoy 3y agoHere's the link to the Florida Atlantic University article that this piece summarizes https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/perfect-pathogen-storm https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/perfect-pathogen-storm
- re5i5tor 3y agoFAU, home of the NCAA-M basketball Cinderella team!
- sberens 3y agolink to the study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135423004694?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004313542...
- TSiege 3y agoA concern that's been in the back of mind for a while is, what if plastic isn't as long lasting as we think? To put another way, what is the carbon footprint of microorganisms evolving to eat it? Are we looking at another carbon bomb?
- thsksbd 3y agoFor all the reasons to hate plastic in the oceans, I wouldn't worry about that. Think of the plastic full cycle, almost all plastic comes from oil, but almost all oil goes to energy production. Therefore what plastic makes it into the oceans represents a small fraction of the total carbon emissions. Besides, it appears to take a very long time to decay, significantly reducing the GHG potential of plastic
- opwieurposiu 3y agoAbout 4% of oil is used to make plastic, so even if all the yearly output of plastic was converted to CO2 by microbes it would not be a huge increase.
- kube-system 3y agoBut discarded plastic currently keeps CO2 from all of the plastic ever made sequestered.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago"All plastic ever made" isn't as much as you would imagine, because half of all plastic ever made has been made in the last 13 years !
- spurgu 3y agoThat's crazy. And depressing. Have we learned nothing?
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
- Darkphibre 3y agoSeems to me like the pathogen is just adapting to have a new transport mechanism? Rather than it decomposing or making use of microplastics. Rather than attaching to seaweed, it can also stick to microplastics and (hopefully) be ingested by marine wildlife. At least as I read the articles.
- UberFly 3y agoI don't know if we're at the tipping point yet, but when I read reports like this I feel like it's getting pretty damn close.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoAlas, the psychological relief of knowing we're past some tipping point will likely never come. Even when we're quite far gone we'll still have a sliver of hope, and we'll magnify its probability in our imaginations the way we already magnify that of of complying with our current climate goals.
- scythe 3y agoThe article mentions the Vibrio genus several times, but doesn't mention that this is the genus of bacteria responsible for cholera, which may be helpful context in understanding what it does and what you may have heard about it before.
- wonderwonder 3y agoHonest question, can't we just mix gasoline or something similar with something that will make it float, pour it over the sargasso and then set it on fire? Edit: we control burn areas on land all the time. Why not on the ocean?
- kwere 3y agowhy not harvest it with ships?
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoAh yes, just add petrochemicals and hope the environmental disaster gets better. Best bets to just leave it the fuck alone.
- jxf 3y agoTo be clear, you want to dump enough gasoline-napalm into the Atlantic Ocean to incinerate a 5,500-mile-long belt of something that's mostly submerged in water?
- ourmandave 3y agoWell, it's either that or nuke the hurricane that washed it ashore. /s
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoIt's an interesting thought experiment, and I think undeserving of downvotes. If you could get a bunch of balloons underneath the seaweed to float it above the water, maybe it would have a hope of burning -- but the balloons would have to withstand fire. Difficult. With a heroic effort maybe you could sweep the stuff onto a beach where it could burn. You'd burn a lot of fuel doing it, though, and then a lot of seaweed, and you wouldn't have changed the conditions that led to its growth in the first place.
- PhasmaFelis 3y agoGasoline already floats, very well. Oil spills are still long-lasting environmental disasters. Also, it's difficult to burn to a soaking-wet object without drying it out first. It's difficult to dry out things that are in the ocean.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoBiology is beating us over the head about how to address climate change. Grow more of it and sequester the remains.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoNot to suggest you shouldn't be concerned -- you absolutely should be -- but please note that the language in this article contains a lot of qualifiers, like could and appears to. They don't really know what's going on and so they don't really know if this is all bad news or if there is some silver lining here of some sort, such as a potential means to get rid of plastics in the ocean. That possibility is not unprecedented. We use petroleum-eating microbes to help clean up oil spills in the ocean. Such microbes are typically harmless to humans. (Typically -- with the exception that people with cystic fibrosis sometimes die from infection with them though normal humans almost never get infected. To me, this implies people with CF likely retain petroleum products, including plastics, more than average.)
- XorNot 3y agoThe problem with petroleum-eating microbes is that they flood the local area with waste products. That it's no longer petroleum doesn't mean it won't still wipe out the local ecosystem - i.e. how fertilizer run-off destroys estuaries because it triggers an algal bloom which promptly chokes off everything else.
- antonvs 3y agoThe difference from petroleum-eating bacteria is that the genus found in these sargassum patches, Vibrio, includes some much more virulent pathogens. These include (1) flesh-eating bacteria, (2) the species which causes cholera, and (3) the species that causes vibriosis, the intestinal illness commonly contracted from undercooked seafood or exposure to seawater. The common factor between cholera and vibriosis is the effect these bacteria have on the human gut, increasing permeability ("leaky gut syndrome"). As such, the Vibrio genus is "the dominant cause of death in humans from the marine environment" (quote from the article's FAU source.) On top of that, sargassum has been increasing due to factors like increasing water temperatures, and large amounts of it end up on beaches or just offshore. It is collected by people in various ways, and even sometimes turned into animal feed. That's not the case with deployments of petroleum-eating bacteria. Sargassum also acts as an important habitat for many kinds of marine life, increasing the number of vectors by which new Vibrio bacteria could come in contact with humans. This all means that the potential for a bad outcome is relatively high, but as for any actual concrete risk currently, as you say that hasn't yet been established.
- mintaka5 3y agoas a surfer, this scares the crap outta me.
- ggm 3y agoI'd like a marine biologist and microbiologist to say just how concerning vibrio is in context: Out of context, sure it's a bug associated with diseases we can catch and which wreak havoc. But lots of bacteria have different forms, intensities, effects. It depends. We're partly made up of bacteria, in a safe context (the gut) How variant is the level of this bacteria in the beachfront, compared to e.g. from enteric sources (sewage) or normal deposits? Is it seasonal? Is it also part of the food chain of something else?
- stainablesteel 3y agoeither this is the next scaremongering or the next lab-made bio-weapon can't wait to hear this on blast for 5 years
- dopidopHN 3y agoIt looks like we’re entering the world of that SF book « the windup girl » where plagues and crop failure are the default mode.
- luxuryballs 3y agoI mean I want to say I would be fine with banning plastic and just using paper/cloth/glass/metal/wood/stone for everything… but I’m not fully sure what I would be giving up here.
- spurgu 3y agoSome things are really useful in plastic (like mechanical parts) but there's a lot that we could live without (replace as you said), even though it would be more expensive (short term). I'm actively trying to choose products with less plastic but it's becoming increasingly hard to find alternatives.
- nostromo 3y agoI’m fine with plastic where paper can’t be used so long as we recycle it or return it to the ground where it came from. Glass seems great - until you learn that sand extraction might be the only thing worse in terms of habitat destruction than oil itself.
- autoexec 3y agoGlass is one of the things we've gotten pretty good at recycling though which should cut down on the need for raw materials.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoWow, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension