Cont'd: "You can see the murky green water,

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,6670018,full.story

"You can see the murky green water, the green pea soup loaded with organic matter," said Lapointe, a marine biologist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Fla. "All that stuff feeds the algae and bacterial diseases that are attacking corals."

Government officials thought they were helping in the early 1990s when they released fresh water that had been held back by dikes and pumps for years. They were responding to the recommendations of scientists who, at the time, blamed the decline of ocean habitats on hypersalinity — excessively salty seawater.

The fresh water, laced with farm runoff rich in nitrogen and other nutrients, turned Florida's gin-clear waters cloudy. Seaweed grew fat and bushy.

It was a fatal blow for many struggling corals, delicate animals that evolved to thrive in clear, nutrient-poor saltwater. So many have been lost that federal officials in May added what were once the two most dominant types — elkhorn and staghorn corals — to the list of species threatened with extinction. Officials estimate that 97% of them are gone.

Sewage and farm runoff kill corals in various ways.

Algae blooms deny them sunlight essential for their survival.

The nutrients in sewage and fertilizer make bacteria grow wildly atop corals, consuming oxygen and suffocating the animals within.

A strain of bacteria found in human intestines, Serratia marcescens, has been linked to white pox disease, one of a host of infectious ailments that have swept through coral reefs in the Florida Keys and elsewhere.

The germ appears to come from leaky septic tanks, cesspits and other sources of sewage that have multiplied as the Keys have grown from a collection of fishing villages to a stretch of bustling communities with 80,000 year-round residents and 4 million visitors a year.

Scientists discovered the link by knocking on doors of Keys residents, asking to use their bathrooms. They flushed bacteria marked with tracers down toilets and found them in nearby ocean waters in as little as three hours.

Nearly everything in the Keys seems to be sprouting green growths, even an underwater sculpture known as Christ of the Abyss, placed in the waters off Key Largo in the mid-1960s as an attraction for divers and snorkelers. Dive-shop operators scrub the bronze statue with wire brushes from time to time, but they have trouble keeping up with the growth.

Lapointe began monitoring algae at Looe Key in 1982. He picked the spot, a 90-minute drive south of Key Largo, because its clear waters, colorful reef and abundance of fish made it a favorite site for scuba divers. Today, the corals are in ruins, smothered by mats of algae.

Although coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, they are home to at least 2 million species, or about 25% of all marine life. They provide nurseries for fish and protect oceanfront homes from waves and storm surges.

Looe Key was once a sandy shoal fringed by coral. 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. Scientists predict that the Keys ultimately will have to be surrounded by sea walls as ocean levels rise.

With a gentle kick of his fins through murky green water, Lapointe maneuvered around a coral mound that resembled the intricate, folded pattern of a brain. Except that this brain was being eroded by the coralline equivalent of flesh-eating disease.

"It rips my heart out," Lapointe said. "It's like coming home and seeing burglars have ransacked your house, and everything you cherished is gone."

The ancient seas contained large areas with little or no oxygen — anoxic and hypoxic zones that could never have supported sea life as we know it. It was a time when bacteria and jellyfish ruled.

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.

On research dives off the Louisiana coast, she has seen cottony white bacteria coating the seafloor. The sulfurous smell of rotten eggs, from a gas produced by the microbes, has seeped into her mask. The bottom is littered with the ghostly silhouettes of dead crabs, sea stars and other animals.

The cause of death is decaying algae. Fed by millions of tons of fertilizer, human and animal waste, and other farm runoff racing down the Mississippi River, tiny marine plants run riot, die and drift to the bottom. Bacteria then take over. In the process of breaking down the plant matter, they suck the oxygen out of seawater, leaving little or none for fish or other marine life.

Years ago, Rabalais popularized a term for this broad area off the Louisiana coast: the "dead zone." In fact, dead zones aren't really dead. They are teeming with life — most of it bacteria and other ancient creatures that evolved in an ocean without oxygen and that need little to survive.

"There are tons and tons of bacteria that live in dead zones," Rabalais said. "You see this white snot-looking stuff all over the bottom."

Other primitive life thrives too. A few worms do well, and jellyfish feast on the banquet of algae and microbes.

The dead zone off Louisiana, the second largest after one in the Baltic Sea, is a testament to the unintended consequences of manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer on a giant scale to support American agriculture. The runoff from Midwestern farms is part of a slurry of wastewater that flows down the Mississippi, which drains 40% of the continental United States.

The same forces at work in the mouth of the Mississippi have helped create 150 dead zones around the world, including parts of the Chesapeake Bay and waters off the Oregon and Washington coasts.

About half of the Earth's landscape has been altered by deforestation, farming and development, which has increased the volume of runoff and nutrient-rich sediment.

Most of the planet's salt marshes and mangrove forests, which serve as a filter between land and sea, have vanished with coastal development. Half of the world's population lives in coastal regions, which add an average of 2,000 homes each day.

Global warming adds to the stress. A reduced snowpack from higher temperatures is accelerating river discharges and thus plankton blooms. The oceans have warmed slightly — 1 degree on average in the last century. Warmer waters speed microbial growth.

Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has been tracking the spread of low-oxygen zones. He has determined that the number is nearly doubling every decade, fed by a worldwide cascade of nutrients — or as he puts it, energy. 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.

These microbes have been barely noticeable for millions of years, tucked away like the pilot light on a gas stove.

"Now," Diaz said, "the stove has been turned on."

In Australia, fishermen noticed the fireweed around the time much of Moreton Bay started turning a dirty, tea-water brown after every rain. The wild growth smothered the bay's northern sea-grass beds, once full of fish and shellfish, under a blanket a yard thick.

The older, bottom layers of weed turned grayish-white and started to decay. Bacteria, feeding on the rot, sucked all of the oxygen from beneath this woolly layer at night. Most sea life swam or scuttled away; some suffocated. Fishermen's catches plummeted.

Most disturbing were the rashes, an outbreak often met with scoffs from local authorities.

After suffering painful skin lesions, fisherman Greg Savige took a sealed bag of the weed in 2000 to Barry Carbon, then director-general of the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency. He warned Carbon to be careful with it, as it was "toxic stuff." Carbon replied that he knew all about cyanobacteria from western Australian waters and that there was nothing to worry about.

Then he opened the bag and held it close to his face for a sniff.

"It was like smearing hot mustard on the lips," the chastened official recalled.

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.

Each spring, Lyngbya bursts forth from spores on the seafloor and spreads in dark green-and-black dreadlocks. It flourishes for months before retreating into the muck. Scientists say it produces more than 100 toxins, probably as a defense mechanism.

At its peak in summer, the weed now covers as much as 30 square miles of Moreton Bay, an estuary roughly the size of San Francisco Bay. In one seven-week period, its expansion was measured at about 100 square meters a minute — a football field in an hour.

William Dennison, then director of the University of Queensland botany lab, couldn't believe it at first.

"We checked this 20 times. It was mind-boggling. It was like 'The Blob,' " Dennison said, recalling the 1950s horror movie about an alien life form that consumed everything in its path.

Suspecting that nutrients from partially treated sewage might be the culprit, another Queensland University scientist, Peter Bell, collected some wastewater and put it in a beaker with a pinch of Lyngbya. The weed bloomed happily.

As Brisbane and the surrounding area became the fastest growing region in Australia, millions of gallons of partially treated sewage gushed from 30 wastewater treatment plants into the bay and its tributary rivers.

Officials upgraded the sewage plants to remove nitrogen from the wastewater, but it did not stop the growth of the infernal weed.

Researchers began looking for other sources of Lyngbya's nutrients, and are now investigating whether iron and possibly phosphorous are being freed from soil as forests of eucalyptus and other native trees are cleared for farming and development.

"We know the human factor is responsible. We just have to figure out what it is," Dennison said.

Recently, Lyngbya has appeared up the coast from Moreton Bay, on the Great Barrier Reef, where helicopters bring tourists to a heart-shaped coral outcropping. When the helicopters depart, seabirds roost on the landing platform, fertilizing the reef with their droppings. Lyngbya now beards the surrounding corals.

"Lyngbya has lots of tricks," said scientist Judith O'Neil. "That's why it's been around for 3 billion years."

It can pull nitrogen out of the air and make its own fertilizer. It uses a different spectrum of sunlight than algae do, so it can thrive even in murky waters. Perhaps its most diabolical trick is its ability to feed on itself. When it dies and decays, it releases its own nitrogen and phosphorous into the water, spurring another generation of growth.

"Once it gets going, it's able to sustain itself," O'Neil said.

Ron Johnstone, a University of Queensland researcher, recently experienced Lyngbya's fire. He was studying whether iron and phosphorous in bay sediments contribute to the blooms, and he accidentally came in contact with bits of the weed. He broke out in rashes and boils, and needed a cortisone shot to ease the inflammation.

"It covered my whole chest and neck," he said. "We've just ordered complete containment suits so we can roll in it."

Fishermen say they cannot afford such pricey equipment. Nor would it be practical. For some, the only solution is to turn away from the sea.

Lifelong fisherman Mike Tanner, 50, stays off the water at least four months each year to avoid contact with the weed. It's an agreement he struck with his wife, who was appalled by his blisters and worried about the long-term health consequences.

"When he came home with rash all over his body," Sandra Tanner said, "I said, 'No, you are not going.' We didn't know what was happening to him."

Tanner, a burly, bearded man, is frustrated that he cannot help provide for his family. Gloves and other waterproof gear failed to protect him.

"It's like acid," Tanner said. "I couldn't believe it. It kept pulling the skin off."

Before the Lyngbya outbreak, 40 commercial shrimp trawlers and crab boats worked these waters. Now there are six, and several of them sit idle during fireweed blooms.

"It's the only thing that can beat us," Greg Savige said. "Wind is nothing. Waves, nothing. It's the only thing that can make us stop work. When you've got sores and the skin peels away, what are you going to do?"

Times staff writer Usha Lee McFarling contributed to this report.

Resources

More information about endangered oceans is available at these educational and governmental websites:

http://scripps.ucsd.edu

http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/

http://www.hboi.edu/

http://www.initrogen.org/

http://www.millenniumassessment.org

http://www.epa.gov/owow/estuaries/guidance/

http://www.hboi.edu/

http://www.initrogen.org/

http://www.seaaroundus.org