Seaweed begins washing ashore
BY PHIL REYNOLDS SOUTH JETTY REPORTER

Sargassum - either you love it or you hate it, and if you're in Port Aransas and you love it, you're probably in a very small minority.

The seaweed begins washing up on Mustang Island beaches about this time every year, pushed by winds that are switching from the winter north winds to the springtime southeast winds. Left to its own devices, it would clog beaches with windrows of seaweed.

That's what bothers folks who view it as a detriment to tourism. As it piles up, it begins to rot - and rotting Sargassum isn't what you'd call the most pleasant experience.

"It's been fairly heavy early this year," said Tony Amos, the University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute scientist who's been observing island beaches for more than 25 years.

However, Amos said this year's influx of seaweed is neither the earliest nor the most.

"It has come in as early as January," he said. "This is about average."

The worst year in his records was 1989. That's the year the Texas General Land Office sent someone here to decide if Port Aransas should be declared an emergency area because of all the seaweed.

The stuff will usually be gone from the beaches by June. That's because of the normal process of deterioration, wind blowing the dried weed away, and efforts by city crews to scrape it off the beaches and get it somewhere else.

"It's not bad quite yet," said Crockett Moreno, the city's supervisor of public works. "But it's getting here."

Moreno's people are the ones who will use scrapers, front-end loaders and dump trucks to keep beaches as clean of seaweed as they can, especially as Memorial Day approaches. Memorial Day is traditionally a heavy tourism weekend.

Moreno said this year, public works will use about the same techniques it used last year: Take some of the Sargassum into the dune line and use graders to dig trenches along the beach into which some of the weed will be dumped. Then sand will be graded back over it to cover it.

Sargassum gave its name to the famous Sargasso Sea in the western Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. It's an area where sailing ships were thought to become becalmed and eventually lost. Some legends claim the ships were clutched by the floating weed and dragged to a halt, much the same way as tourism could be dragged to a halt here if the seaweed persists.

Sargassum isn't all bad, however. Both floating and washed ashore, it provides home and food for dozens of small creatures: shrimp, fish, sea slugs and other animals.

Once the Sargassum is on the beach, those creatures in turn provide a moveable feast for birds and shoredwelling animals.

Left to its own devices, the weeds would eventually dry out and blow up toward the dune line, where they'd serve as snares for blowing sand and seeds. In time, the sand would build up and the seeds would sprout. The result: more sand dunes.

The seaweed that's rotting on the beach now is at least partly responsible for building the beach you enjoy on the weekends.