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Each morning along Mexico’s iconic Caribbean coast, workers with pitchforks ready themselves for another day of war against seaweed.
They haul it off the beach with plastic bags, tanker trucks and small tractors that rumble back and forth in front of sunbathing tourists. By the next morning, new heaps of seaweed have washed ashore and begun to decay — emitting a stench of rotten eggs — and the war starts anew.
This was not what Aymara Flores had promised her two children when she booked a vacation at a luxury Cancun resort.
“I always tell them Cancun is so beautiful, but it’s not the same now,” said Flores, 37, an executive from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, who found it impossible to swim without being scratched by prickly clumps of seaweed. “Honestly, it’s awful.”
From the shores of Barbados to Miami Beach, masses of stinking seaweed have been washing ashore, threatening fragile coastal ecosystems and sparking panic in nations that depend on the millions of tourists that flock to the region each year to bask on white sand and bathe in turquoise waves.
Scientists warn that the algae known as sargassum are a grave new threat to the Caribbean — one as potentially life-altering as rising sea levels or destructive hurricanes.
Each morning along Mexico’s iconic Caribbean coast, workers with pitchforks ready themselves for another day of war against seaweed.
They haul it off the beach with plastic bags, tanker trucks and small tractors that rumble back and forth in front of sunbathing tourists. By the next morning, new heaps of seaweed have washed ashore and begun to decay — emitting a stench of rotten eggs — and the war starts anew.
This was not what Aymara Flores had promised her two children when she booked a vacation at a luxury Cancun resort.
“I always tell them Cancun is so beautiful, but it’s not the same now,” said Flores, 37, an executive from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, who found it impossible to swim without being scratched by prickly clumps of seaweed. “Honestly, it’s awful.”
From the shores of Barbados to Miami Beach, masses of stinking seaweed have been washing ashore, threatening fragile coastal ecosystems and sparking panic in nations that depend on the millions of tourists that flock to the region each year to bask on white sand and bathe in turquoise waves.
Scientists warn that the algae known as sargassum are a grave new threat to the Caribbean — one as potentially life-altering as rising sea levels or destructive hurricanes.