Attack of the Killer Weed.(seaweed)(Brief Article)

Restaurants along Italy's Mediterranean coast are known for seafood dishes such as risotto with squid ink, spaghetti with clams and fried calamari, but increasingly they are serving a delicacy that has scientists worried: fried algae. Not that there's anything wrong with eating it--it's good for the complexion and high in fiber. Problem is, the alga has in recent years become so abundant that it is wreaking havoc on the Mediterranean Sea, killing fish and other sea creatures and threatening to wipe out the fishing industry altogether.

The problem started in the late 1970s, when biologists at the Stuttgart Zoo in Germany decided to liven up their aquarium exhibits. They took Caulerpa taxifolia, a bright green fernlike alga native to the Caribbean, bombarded it with chemicals and ultraviolet rays and selected a mutant strain that thrived in their aquariums. In 1984, a janitor at Jacques Cousteau's Oceanographic Museum in Monaco absent- mindedly emptied a bucket of water from an abandoned aquarium, which contained a few fronds of Caulerpa, into the sea. The alga adopted very nicely to its new Mediterranean home--too nicely.

Scientists have dubbed the seaweed "killer algae," and for good reason. Although it took five years to spread a mere three hectares, more recently it has made steep progress. Dragged far and wide by fishing boats, the seaweed now blankets 13,000 hectares of the Mediterranean Sea floor along the coasts of France, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Turkey, Morocco and the Balearic Islands. Its effect on marine life is devastating. Though not harmful to humans, the alga is poisonous to fish, and it also draws oxygen from the water, smothering clam beds, eggs, corals, sponges and other plant life. If the plant is not stopped, scientists worry that it may eventually destroy all marine life in the Mediterranean. What's more, the Med has none of Caulerpa's natural predators, such as certain snails and other creatures common to its native habitat, the Caribbean. Giovanni Scabbia, head of the Alternative Energy Research Institute in Genoa, says that the resulting decline in sea life in the Mediterranean is unprecedented. "It is becoming a very serious threat," he says. "It must be stopped."

The threat ...