We have published today another article on the foul-smelling brown plant that has invaded beaches all across the Caribbean, including here in the Cayman Islands, and along the Atlantic coast of Florida.

The article from The Weather Channel claims it has never happened before 2011.

This particular seaweed is called Sargassum.

The Optical Oceanography Laboratory from the University of South Florida is producing a daily “Satellite-based Sargassum Watch System (SaWS)” that can be viewed at: http://optics.marine.usf.edu/projects/SaWS.html

The website states:

“This page provides links to Sargassum forecast or outlook bulletins (see bottom of this page), which are updated routinely. The bulletins started in early February 2018, and they are meant to give an outlook of Sargassum bloom probability in certain regions in the upcoming months, based on bloom conditions in previous months, and previous years.

“The 2018 Sargassum bloom in the Caribbean Sea

“In January 2018, unusually high amount of Sargassum was caught in satellite imagery in both the Caribbean and the central West Atlantic. While the former could only be peered by January 2015, the latter represented a historical record. Based on these observations and based on the connectivity between the two regions, in early February 2018 we generated and distributed our first 1-page Sargassum outlook bulletin for the Caribbean Sea, and predicted that 2018 would be a major bloom year for the Caribbean.

“While the monthly bulletins can be found on the bottom of this page, the chart below shows Sargassum areal coverage for each calendar month. The images show distributions of Sargassum areal density for the most recent month, together with the same month in previous years. It is clear that 2018 represents a record-high bloom year for both the Caribbean and the central West Atlantic. The reasons behind this record-high bloom, however, are yet to be determined.”

The crisis first started here in 2015. we were not alone as it was even worse in other Caribbean islands such as St Martin that had piles of the weed as high as five feet.

Hotels across Grand Cayman do their best to keep their beaches clean; the only way to do this is to manually remove the seaweed every morning.

Unfortunately, despite the urging by The Department of Environment, some hotels use heavy machinery to aid them, and this can be detrimental to wildlife. The machines also discourage turtles from coming to the beach and also can crush turtle nests

So, what is the answer?

At present, there isn’t one.

“You can’t solve the problem; you can’t put up a wall or anything,” Iris Monnereau, a regional project coordinator for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Barbados, told Science Magazine. “It’s difficult to go forward.”