The masses of wind-driven seaweed clogging Blacktip Island’s beaches has been designated a marine park. (photo courtesy of Val Schrader/Blacktip Island Marine Parks)
Blacktip Island officials Wednesday announced the creation of the small Caribbean island’s Sargassum Beach Marine Park, providing environmental protection for the masses of sargassum and other seaweed clogging its beaches.
“Sargassum’s the new normal, and we have to embrace it,” marine parks spokesperson Val Schrader said. “There’s so much of it, and turtle grass, washing up, we can’t remove it fast enough. The upside, though, is it’s created a new ecosystem that’s attracting and supporting all sorts of wildlife.
“We’re seeing birds like stilts, egrets, gulls, snipe and other non-beach species feeding in the decaying seaweed, and protecting the rotting piles will safeguard those populations,” Schrader said. “Blacktip Island has become a more important stopping point on migratory flyways, and our ecological diversity is growing.”
Local ecologists agreed.
“This is an important step in protecting a burgeoning habitat,” Blacktip Island Birding Society president Hoot Parrett said. “With the new and varied species on the beaches these days, Blacktip’s a new hot spot for birders word wide. This park’s creation will make the island as famous for birding as it is for scuba diving.”
Other residents oppose the park.
“Rotting seaweed’s a huge, stinky mess, the government has no solution and this is just a way to distract from that,” ecologist Ernestine Bass said. “For every bird watcher it attracts, there a dozen tourists it scares off. This stuff’s killing our island economy.
“As it decomposes, sargassum creates sulfur and cyanide gases,” Bass said. “You can’t sit downwind of it without gagging. And now they’re finding flesh-eating bacteria in beached seaweed, too. There’s no positive to this mess choking our beaches.”
Some local organizations have embraced the park.
“It’s not just the birds. There’s sea life the sargassum supports,” marine science educator Goby Graysby said. “We’re finding rare sargassum eels and sulfurous pipe horses on the seaward side of the grass piles. This is a great opportunity to study these unusual creatures.
“We’re conducting sargassum ecology classes, with students kitted out in full-face rebreathers and haz-mat suits so they can pick through the rotting growth and identify as many new species as possible without passing out. The down side is, with it a protected habitat now, we can’t let the kiddos go out and have sargassum fights like we used to.”
The Blacktip Times 