Invasion of the giant blobs of "sea mucus"

Tara McGinley of Dangerous Minds reports on mucus-like blobs that are forming with increasing frequency in the Mediterranean. They're loaded with bacteria and viruses and the larger ones are 200 kilometers (125 miles) long. Sea snot invasion!

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

Pretty Soon we will have polluted ALL our OCEANS so bad..nobody will be afraid of Sharks ANYMORE..because you can die just by SWIMMING in the OCEAN..Hey..who CARES..maybe YOU DO..DO SOMETHING about it..not TOO late.YET
- Anonymous
  
  Really.. no-one takes any of this seriously and that’s why this planet is shot to hell. IT’S ALL OF OUR FAULTS AND WE ARE DESTROYING THIS WORLD AND ALL THE LIFE ON THIS PLANET.
Anonymous

Benthos?
BobbyMike

They look like the Kombucha molds my son grows for his tea.

Yummy.
mwiik

May I propose ‘snautillus’ as the name for these blobs?
Keneke

And he put his HAND in it????
Jeanie Kilgour

These things are deadly! Seems like most people are so caught up in their looks that they miss this fact!
Anonymous

I feel funky …
jcmoonraker

this reminds me of Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ms-ilMug8A
weatherman

It’s all about perspective and language – you say Sea Snot, I see beautiful underwater clouds!
- slump
  
  “It’s all about perspective and language – you say Sea Snot, I see beautiful underwater clouds!”
  
  I totally agree, weatherman. Some peo-AAAAAACCHHHHOOOOO!!! Oh, geez. I’m so sorry. I seem to have sneezed some clouds onto your coat – here let me just wipe that off. Ummm, what was I saying?
bklynchris

This is mind blowing. Mucus in the human body serves much (not all) of the same purpose. Freaky…. So either the earth is really sick, or its about to ovulate….me thinks its the former but hope for the latter.

jcmoonraker-you’re right, it really is like Nausicaa.
- TJ S
  
  bklynchris – I wasn’t terrified before, but now I am. WTF happens when a planet ovulates? Are we going to go into heat (OMG – global warming), and attract nearby, male planets?
  
  I just hope that Mars fertilizes with a cloud, instead of penetration. I don’t think I could handle interplanetary intercourse.
  - stegodon
    
    Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
    For y’all have knocked her up.
    
    I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
    I was not offended
    For I knew I had to rise above it all
    Or drown in my own shit.
jere7my

Quick! Somebody call China MiÃ©ville!
- 13tales
  
  @jere7my
  
  :D
  
  Someone get him to write an incredibly dense and ornate prose description of the monster…then record a new voice-over for the video!
bklynchris

I just watched the video-we’re all gonna die
Crispinus211

I’m…I’m gonna barf.
jimh

Odds on which achieves sentience first, robots or sea mucilage?
Anonymous

kinda sad to see so many people find this comical
Scuba SM

TJS:
Sheds new light on Deep Impact, huh?

I’d be interested if these type things show up in the Great Lakes.
i_prefer_yeti

Quick!

We must start building the 300KM long NETI POT!
- jimh
  
  And we will fill it with saline solution!
  Oh, yeah…
Anonymous

wow— Will This become the next “home aquarium wonder”?

WHO could resist a Snot Blob in the home aquarium?

Maybe Newt Gingrich and the “boys” can get a national aquarium in Wasington DC to get a NICE 50 foot blob of Sea SNOT and put it on exhibit…?
Its the new “Chia Pet”- WHY NOT give your friends and family a Sean-Snot Blob for Christmas???
Purly

So that’s where it all went after I spit it out over the side of the boat…
friendlysoviet

Still doesn’t explain why they just linked the blog and not the blog post.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/index.php/site/comments/gross_sea_mucus_blobs_on_the_rise/
friendlysoviet

Why are ya posting the source as some blog in which the reader has to scroll down quite a bit just to see a small summary of the actual story.

Here’s the source link.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html
- Beelzebuddy
  
  Blogpolitik, comrade. It’s considered poor form not to link to the post of the blog you found the story on, even if that blog is linking to another blog linking to the actual story. For unpopular but virally durable stories, the daisy chain may get so long that getting to the original article takes more time than reading it.
  
  See, for example,
  http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/blond_joke/
  - TJ S
    
    Beelzebuddy – You (or whoever set that up) are an evil genius, and I salute you.
Anonymous

Oh.

Uh oh.

“God’s Snot” anyone?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_%28novel%29
Anonymous

The mucus is not the problem, it’s just a symptom of a wider problem, an ecological disaster, named eutrophication.
Simper

If you know someone with a saltwater aquarium chances are they have come in contact with something very similar. It’s called cyanobacteria and is present in tanks with too many nutrients usually caused by overfeeding. It is potentially deadly to coral and fish if left unchecked but has a simple solution, a good water change and correcting the overfeeding. This has more to do with us dumping chemicals and fertilizers into the ocean than the temperature itself.
- mdh
  
  Simper, you are essentially correct – but consider that cyanobacteria ruled the earth back when the CO2 concentrations and ocean temperatures were in the vicinity of where we’re heading to, and I just don’t think we can do a water change on the whole Mediterranean sea.