Sargassum Seaweed

This morning, the beach is strewn with a surprising amount of brown seaweed. This is sargassum. Sargassum is a kind of algae with tooth edged leaves and these tiny air-filled bladders to hold it afloat. It forms floating rafts in an area in the mid-Atlantic called the Sargasso sea, where the four currents swirl around it. When our baby turtles hatch and head for the ocean, this is where they are going. The mass of seaweed,which can be 3-4 feet deep, provides shelter for them and a wide variety of other fish and organisms like young eels! The sargassum itself is habitat for dependent organisms like this encrusting bryozoan, these tiny snails, and here’s a sea roach! I love checking the clumps to see what might have washed ashore. As the seaweed on the beach dries out and decomposes, it provides food for these gulls and then stabilizes the shoreline and provides nutrients to dune plants.