From the Vault: The Plague of Mucus

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the organic substance that has been referred to in the scientific literature as “marine mucilage.” Prepare to be slimed. (originally published 7/1/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a vault episode. This one originally aired July one,
and it is called The Plague of Mucus? Are you prepared?
Are you alright? Let's let's jump right into it. Welcome

(00:27):
to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today, we're gonna
be diving into the ocean to take a look at slime, froth, ooze,
and mucus of various kinds. And I thought maybe a

(00:50):
good way to get in the mood for this kind
of discussion would be to do a couple of literary readings,
perhaps Rob if your game. When I was thinking about
this topic, something immediately came to mind. I remember there
was some passage from Walt Whitman in which he identified
very strongly and emotionally with becoming a bit of ooze,
froth and debris washing in the surf. Do do you

(01:11):
mind if I read a bit of Walt Whitman here? Yeah,
go for it. Okay, so this is from his poem
that I think the title has just taken from the
first line, but it's called as I Ebbed with the
Ocean of Life. The whole poem is too long to read,
but I'm just going to read from the fourth section here,
where he really talks about becoming the use Ebb ocean
of life. The flow will return cease, not your moaning,

(01:33):
you fierce old mother, endlessly cry for your castaways. But
fear not deny not me Russell, not up so hoarse
and angry against my feet. As I touch you or
gather from you, I mean tenderly by you and all
I gather for myself and for this phantom, looking down
where we lead, and following me and mine, Me and mine.

(01:54):
Loose wind rows, little corpses, froth snowy white, and bubbles.
See from my dead lips, the ooze exuding at last,
See the prismatic colors, glistening and rolling, tufts of straw, sand,
fragments buoyed hither from many moods, one contradicting another, from

(02:14):
the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell, musing, pondering,
a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or
soil up just as much out of fathomless workings, fermented
and thrown, a limp blossom or two torn just as
much over the waves, floating, drifted at random, just as

(02:36):
much for us that sobbing dirge of nature. Just as much.
Whence we come, that blare of the cloud trumpets, we
capricious brought hither we know not whence spread out before you.
You up there, walking or sitting, whoever you are, we
two lie in drifts at your feet. O man, women, Uh,

(02:56):
feeling a little moody in that one. Yeah, this is
weird because, I mean, Whitman has his his darker moods,
but I feel like this is definitely one of the
more downer Whitman moments. A lot of times he finds
a way to surge back up. But that's the end
of the poem. It kind of ends on a down note. Though. Weirdly,
even when Whitman is feeling down, you can still he
You can tell he still has that universal connectedness perspective.

(03:17):
He still is every molecule of everything in the ocean,
even all the debris and ooze and froth and sand
and trash. Yeah, No, that's that's that's really good. And uh.
And when you initially brought this up and I was
reading it, I was like, oh man, this is this
is reminding me of something, not that it's reminding me
of something specific, but just sort of a similar vibe.
And it got me thinking about h G wells uh uh.

(03:40):
It's particularly I can't remember if it's when the time
traveler goes to the very end of time or the
very beginning, but he encounters kind of like, you know,
this this sludge like dark world of slimy life. I
don't remember either way. Well, he goes towards the end,
when he goes the farthest in the future, it's when
he encounters that the world this just crabs. It's like

(04:02):
remember those those big like Arthur pod type creatures. But
maybe he also goes back in time. Maybe that's working
on the the old school primordial ooze kind of idea
of the origins of life. Yeah. And you see this
pop up in weird fiction of the twentieth century as well,
particularly in the works of of Clark Ashton Smith, who

(04:22):
was a writer of weird dark fantasy tales and it
was also a poet. And uh and I believe later
in life he worked with like sculpture. But but I
was looking up, like, what was it. What's a nice
slimy ocean bit from Clark Ashton Smith? And I found
a really good one, from a story titled The Light

(04:42):
from the Pole. And I'm not sure when this was written.
I don't think it was actually published until after his death.
But I'm just going to read a quick paragraph from this,
if you don't mind, go for it. Through the middle summer,
the fisher folk who dwelt in wattle huts below the
tall towers of far Azen went forth daily in their
coracles of hide and willow, and cast their nets in

(05:04):
the accustomed manner of their trade. But all that they
gathered from the sea was dead and withered, as if
in the blast of great coldness, such as would emanate
from the trans Arctic ice. And they drew forth from
their assigns. Living monsters as well, such as the eldest captains,
had never beheld things triple headed and tailed and thinned

(05:27):
with horror, black shapeless things that turned a liquid foulness,
and ran from the net like a vile i corps,
or headless shapes like bloated moons with green frozen rays
about them, or things leprous eye and bearded with stiffly
oozing slime. It was as if some transdimensional and long
blocked channel beneath the known, familiar seas of Earth had

(05:50):
opened suddenly into the strange waters of ultra mundane oceans
teeming with repulsive and malformed life. Wow. Well that goes
the supernatural dimensions, but at the same time still connects
very much to the topic we're gonna be talking about today. Yeah. Oh,
and by the way, if some of you are wanting
ultra mundane, that just sounds like even more mundane than usual.

(06:11):
It actually means the opposite. Ultramundane means like from beyond
the soldier system. Oh. I would not have known that. Yeah,
it threw me for your curve at first, because I'm like, oh,
the ultra mundane. Yeah, man, that must be and that's
that's just supermundane. But now what does the part knew
what he was doing? Especially average? But anyway, on these
themes of slime and mucus, it got me thinking about

(06:33):
this question, like, what does life from the microscopic level
to the plants and the megafauna all have in common. Well,
one thing that is common to most life, especially most
life that lives in the water, is mucus or slime,
you know, some kind of like slimy substances, viscous, slimy,
lubricating kinds of substances in the body are really some

(06:57):
of the keystones of organic life. I was thinking about, how, uh,
there was one time when I was in high school
and I remember being present for a a sermon that
was preached on the verse in the Bible about how
the blood is the life, and the point of the
sermon was that was that that statement the blood is
the life in the Bible is scientifically accurate, which, on reflection,

(07:18):
that's kind of a funny claim to make. I mean,
I guess that's true. Like if you remove all the
blood from something, it doesn't live anymore. Um. But but
I started thinking about how the slime is the life.
The mucus is the life because you've got micro organisms
of course that secrete uzy mucus like substances called mucilage.
But you can also find that implants. If you break
a stalk of succulent, it will leak a viscous mucilage too. Yeah, you,

(07:42):
I mean, we could easily do an entire podcast series,
if not an entire podcast period on slime because you
look at that, I mean, you just look at the
ways the importance of slime and the human body, you know, uh,
and it's it's it's greatly important. Look at some of
the very unique creatures that utilized slime so well. Um.
The hag fish, for example, that we've discussed numerous times,

(08:05):
a true wizard of slime, um, a sorcerer of ooze
that that is able to to to utilize this uh,
this this thick, slimy substance that it that it exudes um,
you know, so wonderfully as a self defense mechanism. Yeah.
And the truly amazing thing about the hag fish is
how much of it it can create and how fast. Yeah.

(08:28):
Another big one is the slime that you encounter as
the very outer layer of fish in the ocean. You know,
like this is it's not just something that is on
their body. It is something of their body, but it
serves as an outer layer. Um. So you know, when
you're when you're handling a fish, even if you're you know,
catching and releasing, if you're disrupting that that outer layer,

(08:50):
you're disrupting some of the protections afforded to the organism now.
But of course there's plenty of internal use for slime
and mucus and ooze as well, because if you think
about inside your body, tons of your organs and surfaces
and tissues are lined with mucus of various sorts that
are very important for your body. I mean, you've got
mucus in your nose, mucus and all kinds all kinds

(09:10):
of parts, so you. But of course, I guess one
thing we should recognize is that we are speaking kind
of loosely in a general sense, about similar types of
substances with similar physical properties that are not all necessarily
the same thing. They're not created by the same biochemical
pathways always, uh, you know, they come from different kinds
of life. But in this loose sense, almost all life

(09:31):
has some kind of slime or or ooz or goo
or mucus. In common life just kind of makes mucus. Yeah,
I mean, that's that's really the secret of the is
right there. But today we wanted to look at this
question of what happens when the mucus gets out of hand,
what happens when it becomes a plague like mass that
is not not merely inside the body, not merely on

(09:55):
the body, not merely uh, floating around in little tiny
clumps in the shan, but when it comes to dominate
the geography and you can see it from airplanes. That's
what we're going to talk about today. So shout out
that I got the idea to talk about this today
when I came across an article in the Atlantic by
Sarah Jong called A slimy calamity is creeping across the Sea.

(10:19):
And this article is about an organic substance that has
been referred to in the scientific literature as marine mucilage,
but it is more commonly known to people in the
fishing industry and people who have encountered it firsthand as
things like sea snot or see saliva. And the article

(10:39):
is about how this stuff has lately become an absolute
plague near the shores of Turkey, specifically in a place
called the Sea of Marmara, which is in northwest Turkey,
and it's the body of water that connects the a
gan C on the west to the Black Sea on
the on the northeast. And so if you have not
already read an articles about this stuff, we're seeing pictures

(11:02):
of it. This one is really worth looking up to
see with your own eyes. In fact, there is an
astonishing photo gallery on the website of The Atlantic right
now that was posted June one called photos Turkey Cease
not Disaster. So I'd highly recommend checking this out if
you can. But we will try to describe a few
of these images here for those of you who can't

(11:23):
go look it up right now. And Rob, I've got
these here for you to look at as well. So
I pulled a few of them. This first one was
a photo taken by Mohammed Ennis Yielder Rim and it's
an aerial photo from June one of all these boats
in the water off the shore of Istanbul, and it
looks like they're floating in one of those buckets that

(11:45):
people used to make tie dye t shirts, except instead
of all the colors of the rainbow, it's just various
hues of off white and tan, it's this giant, floating, swirling,
starry night of beige slime. Yeah, this is I think
this is a Getty image as well, from the Getty website,

(12:05):
but it is um it it's really beautiful. If not,
and if I didn't know what it was, I would
just assume that this was a painting because it looks
like some sort of a surreal uh you know, oil
painted ocean upon which the artist has depicted realistic looking
um depictions of ships and boats. Well, another way I

(12:26):
could view it is again, because this is from a
great distance, it is kind of beautiful. It also looks
like boats that maybe somehow all became beached on a
vast stretch of sand. So like if like if the
ocean retreated and left all these boats stranded in the
dunes with these drifts and current like patterns all swirling
around them, and they were just sitting in the sand.

(12:48):
I I could see that being a what this is.
But no, they are on the surface of the water.
And also I worry for them if they must start
their engines. As we'll get to uh a bit later
on about about some of the problems that the stuff
causes for for powered boats. But as beautiful as this
might look from above, as kind of like weirdly, I

(13:10):
don't know at that that that boundary line between gross
and beautiful when you get up close, it really does
get more just obviously disgusting. So this next image is
of a diver surfacing from underneath a large mat of
marine mucilage. This one was taken by Serhat Kagdas for

(13:30):
the Anadolue Agency, which is a Turkish state media organization,
and according to the caption, this person is involved in
a marine mucilage cleanup operation at a Kata Boston beach
which is also in in Istanbul or off the shore
of Istanbul. And this is from June of twenty one also.
But if if you're trying to imagine the texture of

(13:51):
this stuff up close from this image here, it looks
kind of like if you've ever tried to make beef stock,
or like a poor grammin broth. All of the scum
that rises to the top of the pot as the
impurities are are removed at first from the bones and
the connecting tissues. That that stuff that floats up there,

(14:12):
except add into that like some wilted toilet paper and
aloe vera gel. Yeah, that that is a good description um.
Another way might be to imagine if you filled a
crop pot like a pressure cooker with cauliflower and then
cooked it way too long where you just turned it

(14:34):
to mush. Like that's what this kind of looks like, Yeah,
so up close, a lot of the beauty has gone
and it becomes frankly revolting. But I want to come
back on the beautiful side. Because also in this photo
gallery they had one that's an underwater image. And one
of the things that came through is I started to
read more and more about this stuff is how in

(14:54):
a lot in some sense, you can't really appreciate what
it is unless you look at views of it from underwater. Because,
for example, a lot of scientists had been trying to
study this stuff for years, but we're having trouble because
the equipment that they used to retrieve samples from the
water would end up churning it up and shaking it up.

(15:15):
That would kind of destroy its structure. So to really
see what form it takes as it's just floating in
the water column you have you kind of have to
go down yourself or see pictures taken from beneath the surface.
So this one picture was by Sebnim Costcun also for
the Nadolu agency and uh it's an underwater photo of

(15:35):
a diver in the Sea of Marmara near a stand bull.
Again from this one's from May and this one looks
to me like a scene from a Forbidden Planet type
vintage sci fi movie. The water is dimly lit but
extremely green, and the diver has these twin work lamps
that it looks kind of like, you know, crewman Hicks

(15:57):
has wandered into an alien spider web. And so there's
just this translucent matrix of goop enveloping everything spun right
out of the shelb of the sea. Yeah, and I
guess it drives home. And you can't tell, really tough
on the image how deep the individual is, but yet
you certainly get the sense that this is not a

(16:18):
mere merely a surface phenomena. This is something that extends
at least somewhat into the water column, right, And we'll
get into more detail as we go on about how
that happens. I think they're there are different stages depending
on the conditions that that cause it to float or
stay suspended in the water column. Um, but we'll explain
that as we go on. One last photo I thought
we should look at before we move on, Rob. Is

(16:40):
this one of workers trying to vacuum this stuff up
with hoses. I think this is again near at stenbol
uh In in the Marmara. See this is from June.
Uh and the stuff here that's going up into the
hose looks very much like overflow from a sewer clean out. Yeah,
our big cat it like a lot of cat vomit. Maybe, oh,

(17:02):
big cat vomit. You mean, like the vomit is big
or like from a big cat, like a lion talking.
I'm talking like big time cat cat vomit here, like
like cat vomit so expansive that Peter Gabriel write a
song about it for real cat vomit. Yeah. One of
the articles I was reading about this had a really
good physical description. It was by Selene Ugertash, writing for

(17:23):
the The for The Guardian in May of one and you.
Gurtash said that when seen from above, it looks like
a brush of beige swirled across the dark blue waters
of the Sea of Marmara. Up close, it resembles a creamy,
gelatinous blanket of Quicksand yeah, so from the air looks
like a cappuccino ocean, like the surface of a cappuccino.

(17:46):
Up close it looks it just looks gross, very grass. Now.
In that article in the Atlantic by Sarah Jong, she
talks about different names for the different types of accumulations
of it. So you've got what's an as marine snow.
That's a that's a phenomenon that ultimately connects to marine muselage.
But these are of course tiny little flakes and droplets

(18:08):
that are usually drifting slowly down towards the sea floor. Uh,
they're They're found in the ocean all the time, just
the little flakes, little bits of life. They are drifting around.
But then when when the marine muselage starts to accumulate,
you've got these things called stringers, which he says, resemble
a kind of sticky goo. This is more actually similar

(18:29):
in appearance to human nasal mucus. But then you've also
got clouds, which are maybe more like you know that
maybe when the stringers come together they form clouds. It's
more like that giant spider web under the surface of
the water. Uh. They're they're delicate and they break apart
when you touch them. But they just form these big,
sort of translucent white masses floating in the water. So

(18:53):
I guess we should get more into describing the phenomenon
of of what's actually happening here. I mentioned that this
is something that's going on into Herkey right now, specifically
in the Sea of Marmara. But marine mucilage is a
broader phenomenon than what's happening in Turkey right now, both
in terms of time and geography. So the Sea of
Marmara is not the only place that experiences surges of

(19:14):
this stuff, and it's not the first time it has happened.
But the slime infestation at Marmara is especially bad this year,
and the problem does seem to be getting worse in
the region over time. So I found a source illuminating
this as a scientific paper discussing marine mucilage in the
Adriatic Sea, which is nearby. It's in the Mediterranean. The

(19:35):
Adriatic is the stretch of sea between Italy and the Balkans.
And this is a paper by Roberto den Ovarro, Serena
fonda Umani and Antonio pusque Do and it's called Climate
Change and the Potential Spreading of marine mucilage and microbial
Pathogens in the Mediterranean Sea. This was published in Plos

(19:56):
one in two thousand nine. This is a highly cited
paper about marine mucilage. Most of the articles that I
was reading mentioned this paper at one point or another.
But in tracking the history of this stuff, they go
all the way back to the eighteenth century. The author's
right quote. Worldwide, the highly productive and shallow Adriatic Sea,

(20:17):
and particularly it's a northern portion within the Mediterranean Basin,
is the area most severely affected by the outbreak of
massive marine mucilage. Mucilage was reported here for the first
time in seventeen twenty nine, and was originally described as
a quote dirty c phenomenon, or in Italian that would

(20:37):
be mare sporko, because it causes the clogging of fishing nets. Uh.
And I do like the name mare Sporko. I'm not
quite sure why. Maybe because it sounds like it has
a porky element somehow. It could easily be the name
of a demon in Dante's Inferno. Oh yeah, yeah, ma
Sporko hanging out with you know, the very with the

(20:59):
malacotta and all Mala bronco. Or I might be getting
that name wrong. Yeah, there's Mala Coda in there, and
of course Scarmiglian, Scarbiglian. Lots of good names. So what
would the dirty sea demon be? I mean, usually they're
more kind of like animals are personified. This would be
like the ocean itself is a demon, yeah, or just

(21:21):
kind of a roughly humanoid form made out of this
CEA snot that we're describing. That's the way I'm picturing it. Yeah,
So outbreaks of CEA snot, according to the authors of
this paper, have been occurring in the Adriatic ever since,
ever since they were observed, and you know, possibly before
that too, but it was first documented in seventeen twenty
nine and they've been recurring ever since. But the frequency

(21:43):
has increased sharply in the last thirty years or so.
And this paper was published in two thousand nine, so
that would mean since around nineteen eighty. And the author
is right about how once this stuff aggregates, an outbreak
of marine mucilage can stay floating on the surface or
suspended throughout the water column for around two to three months,

(22:04):
and then after that it tends to float down and
settle on the sea bottom. And there are several reasons
why the stuff is considered undesirable by humans. Some of
them are pretty obvious. They write, for example, quote the
presence of mucilage makes the seawater unsuitable for bathing because
of the bad smell produced and the adherents of the
mucilage on the skin of bathers. So it's kind of like,

(22:28):
I don't know, just like describing why you wouldn't want
to swim in water that has tons of mucus floating
on top of it. But I appreciate that they spelled
that out. Um. Now, of course I mentioned already that
over time it tends to settle on the sea floor,
and once it's there, the author's right quote, these large
aggregates coat the sediments, extending in certain cases for kilometers

(22:51):
and causing hypoxic and or anoxic conditions, which of course
means that the water is being depleted of dissolved oxygen,
which marine animals need in order to breathe. And then
they write, quote, the consequent suffocation of benthic organisms, including
bottom associated necton, provokes serious economical damage to tourism and fisheries.

(23:12):
And a note here necton these are some of the
organisms that are being affected. Necton means animals that are
strong swimmers that can move independent of water currents, so
this would be opposed to seafloor organisms and plankton that
just float with the currents. So several bad things about it.
Obviously it's bad for the local wildlife because it can

(23:33):
can smother them or suffocate them in various ways. But
it's also of course bad for humans, not just because
it kills all the wildlife, but because it creates these
bad conditions. Nobody wants to swim in the water. It's unsightly,
it hurts tourism, but also it creates a big problem
for boats and fisheries. Uh So, in Jong's article, she

(23:53):
talks about how U boats sometimes can't go to sea
when there's all this mut is floating around because the
mucus um it quote clogs up the seawater intake that
cools the motor. So if you've got all this mucus
going in where the motor is trying to take in
water for coolant, I guess that just clogs it up

(24:14):
and then the engine can't work. Yeah. So, not even
getting into how little you want to swim in these waters,
it impacts your ability to go out in a boat
and fish, to use boats for certain degrees of trade
and travel. Um. Yeah, it's a problem. Regarding the effect
on the benthic organisms that are on the seafloor, A

(24:34):
rob I found a couple of pictures just for you
to look at. That include a starfish and one has
a crab that are both apparently just dead and smothered
by the sea snot they have turned a kind of
palid shade and are I don't know what exactly about
it killed them, Perhaps it smothered them or interfered with
their ability to breathe, or maybe it's uh, it going

(24:55):
through its decomposition cycle somehow removed dissolved oxygen from the
water that could be affecting them as well. But yeah,
it just looks generally very bad for the what's living
on the sea floor. Yeah, I encourage everyone to look
at these photos because it, yeah, it's just it looks
like zombified sea life. It's just really ghastly. And the
photography is is beautiful in its own right. It's it's

(25:15):
it's excellent photography, but it is capturing something that is
rather ghastly and disturbed than now. We mentioned that a
lot of the older documented outbreaks of marine mucilage mentioned
in that two thousand nine paper in Plos one were
in the Adriatic Sea, which is of course different than

(25:37):
the Sea of marmara Um. Apparently there had not been
outbreaks of marine mucilage reported in Turkey before two thousand seven,
but now, of course that's where the big problem is situated.
It seems like some of the problem from the Adriatic
has been alleviated by some interventions that will talk about
later on. But this current outbreak of C SNOTS seems

(25:58):
to have begun in December of uh there's some of
the early signs of it where that fishermen were noticing
that it was preventing them from using their nets. I
saw this thing about the fisher nets mentioned in a
lot of articles, and I was trying to figure out
exactly how it makes the nets unusable. I couldn't nail
that down for certain, though. I think possibly what's going

(26:20):
on is it makes the nets too heavy, as it
like sort of clogs them up they don't really work,
or possibly it interferes with the ability of water to
pass freely through what's supposed to be the holes in
the nets. Yeah, you can easily imagine how it would
turn a net into a parachute made out of netting
and slime. Yeah. Gross. And another thing is I actually

(26:44):
saw this claim sited in an article for The Washington
Post by Antonio Neuri Farson, who said that it's also
sometimes making people wonder whether fish that are successfully caught
in the snot infested waters are safe to eat, And
there was no ruling on whether they were or not.
I don't know of any reason why they wouldn't be,

(27:05):
but at least said people were worried about that. But
it wasn't just people in the fishing industry who started
to notice this this problem with the new outbreak of
marine mucilage. Also it was noticed by by scientists. There
is one example cited in that article in The Guardian
by Selene Ugertash and this one um. This one refers

(27:26):
to a scientist named Dr barishe ot Salp who is
a marine biologist at the China cal A Osaki's mart University.
And uh this researcher was diving to look at corals
off the China cal A straight and notice the extent
of the s saliva underneath the water and points out

(27:47):
that it's especially dangerous to immobile animals along the bottom
of the ocean, like coral. Uh so so Dr Otsalpire
found that that the gold coral or Savalia savag leah
and the violescent sea whip or Paramurissa Clavada were the
most armed by the ceasno bloom. And then near the shoreline,

(28:10):
it of course threatens fish populations. There have been reports
that thousands of fish have turned up dead near coastal settlements.
So it's bad stuff for the marine life. So just
utter disruption here. It's it's you know, we recently talked
about the sargasm weed and and uh and large quantities
of that that that have at times become a problem

(28:33):
for coastal communities and and and actually creating some of
the same problems we've discussed here, making it difficult to
to to leave in a boat, that sort of thing,
making an unpleasant to visit the beach or be in
the water. But in those cases, I mean, the sargasm
is still an environment that things are thriving in. And
this this seems like more of a total disruption of

(28:56):
all of the of the marine environment at all levels. Well,
it turns out there's evidence that something is thriving in here,
but it's not very helpful for the marine life around it.
So get more to that in just a moment. Uh. First,
I guess I wanted to talk about like what actually
is this stuff physically, like what is it and how
is it formed? Uh So, here I'm turning back to

(29:17):
that study from two thousand nine in p o OS
one by den Ovarro at All, and the way they
explain it is that marine muselage starts with what's known
as marine snow. So I'm gonna read from their their
explanation in their introductory section here they define marine snow
as quote amorphous aggregates with the size ranging from a

(29:38):
few millimeters to several meters, and so these are just
little flex of organic material that form an important part
of of the ocean because of course it's marine snow
raining down from the the the trophic areas in the
top of the water column where you've got the photosynthesizing
organisms you know, they make in or g from from sunlight,

(30:01):
and then they die and float down or stuff they
produce comes off of them and floats down, and it
creates this sort of blizzard of organic material that rains
down below and feeds organisms that live much lower down
in the water column who are not able to produce
energy from sunlight. And of course that processes is as

(30:22):
they say, ubiquitous in the oceans of the world. It's everywhere.
But then they write, quote water columns stratification, So that's
the the forming of these layers in the water column.
Water column stratification under summer conditions favors the progressive coalescence
of small sized aggregates into large, massive sheets, thin layers, flocks,

(30:46):
and clouds, which are collectively known as marine mucilage. Mucilage
is a gelatinous evolving stage of marine snow which can
reach huge dimensions and cover areas of hundreds of kilometers
of coastline. Now we'll come back to the exact mechanics
of how those aggregates form in the water column. But yeah,

(31:07):
so what what what's going on here? Is that something
that would be marine snow just these little flex of
mucus or decomposing matter or or organic material of some
kind collect when there are certain conditions in the water
column and they start to stick together and form these
huge masses, and those masses become marine mucilage, again, the

(31:30):
gelatinous evolving stage of marine snow. So in terms of
its chemical composition, they say marine mucilage is quote is
made of exo polymeric compounds with highly colloidal properties that
are released by marine organisms through different processes including phytoplankton
exudation of photosynthetically derived carbohydrates produced under stressful conditions. Uh.

(31:55):
And then they say and through the death and composition
of cell wall debris. Such a release can be coupled
with a limited ability of prokaryotes to hydrolyze these exo
polymers by means of extracellular enzymes, leading to the release
and accumulation of large molecular weight compounds in the system. UH. So,

(32:15):
so a lot of this stuff is being produced by phytoplankton,
and it has a carbohydrate basis. Though another researcher that
I was reading was saying that the marine muselage ends
up being this combination of carbohydrates, proteins, and fat, which
is funny because it makes it like, you know, it's
the full gamut. It's like a gravy. It's got everything.

(32:37):
But apparently these these uh carbohydrates from phytoplankton are a
big part of it. And then we come back to
what you mentioned a minute ago about whether this would
be a habitat or not, so we know the sarcasm
seaweed is a is a habitat. Uh. The authors here
right quote these processes can be associated with viral infections

(32:57):
of prokaryotes and phytoplankton and the consequent cell license parentheses
viral shunt, which further contributes to release and accumulation of
dissolved organic matter in the water column. And what they
end up alleging is that the build up a marine
mucilage essentially forms a habitat for potentially pathogenic bacteria and viruses.

(33:20):
So E. Coli can thrive in these things, which can
lead to infections of other organisms in the water, which
can sort of create a feedback loop here. Oh, that's
that's not good at all. That's that's not the sort
of environment we're looking for. So I guess it's time
to talk about, like what are the causes, what what
is the process, and what are the causes that creates

(33:42):
this kind of unprecedented build up of of marine mucilage. Well,
having seen Ghostbusters too, I assume it has to do
with like negative uh, like like emotions building up in
an urban population that some museum in Istanbul imported a
painting of Vigo the Carpathian and uh yeah, and everybody

(34:04):
in the city started being mean to each other, and
then this is what you get all right case close.
We gotta do something about that that painting. Got to
shoot that painting with some some charged slime. Is that
what they do? And oh yeah they Oh that's right
in in Ghostbusters two. Yeah, they charged the slime with
good vibes by having everybody dance to that song and
they shoot it and they shoot it out of the guns. Yeah,

(34:26):
they defeat they defeat Vigo with good vibes. That was
that was you know, say what you about Ghostbusters too,
but it leaned into the slime, like I'm guessing Ackroyd
and Raymison they were like, well, what worked in the
first one. Oh the slime, the slime worked, Let's do
let's do even more slime. Ghostbusters two is not great,
but all the Vigo the Carpathian scenes are wonderful. Oh yeah,

(34:49):
I forget that name of that actor, Nicole talking to him.
Oh yeah, he's a German actor that played that actual
Vigo Um a former boxer, kind of a man of mystery.
But he also pops up in John Carpenter's in the
Mouth of Madness, playing a distraught villager in some sort
of nightmare realm. And it's a it's it's a one

(35:11):
of many fun little cameos in that movie. Wilhelm von
Homburg was his name, and he was a wrestler, perhaps
a boxer too, but he was definitely a wrestler. He
was also in die Hard, Oh and die Hard. Oh?
Was he one of the villains? Oh? I almost I'm
almost certain he was. I don't think this is a
kind of guy who played anything. But wait, it wasn't

(35:31):
the police chief who was also in the Breakfast Club.
I can't imagine this guy ever played police chief, not
not in the US. Anyway, Maybe he played police chief
in him. I could see him playing a cop like
in a German show. So it's possible. No, I was
joking it was not that guy, don't I forget his name,
but that guy's that guy. Everybody knows that guy. Yeah, okay, anyway, sorry,

(35:52):
we gotta come back to So the causes the causes
of marine muselage um, so across everything I was reading,
there are three main causes that have been uh put
forth as the probable primary explanations of what's going on
with this with this c SnO outbreak. And these causes
are and I'll explain each of these as we go on.

(36:12):
Warmer temperatures, calm weather, and specific kinds of water pollution. Now,
first of all, I mentioned warm temperatures. Why would warm
temperatures contribute Well, one reason is that phytoplankton populations apparently
grow more at higher temperatures, and phytoplankton seems to be

(36:33):
one of the main or the main source of of
this marine mucilage build up. And so of course ocean
waters are getting warmer. That's consistent with climate change. One
Turkish researcher I was reading was cited in that Washington
Post article mentioned that the Sea of Marmora was several
degrees warmer than average after a very mild winter, And
of course, uh, there's just continuous warming of the oceans

(36:56):
due to climate change. But then also you've got the
idea of particular kinds of pollution. So one thing that
is definitely true is you don't want to overfeed the sea.
That can cause really bad things to happen downstream in
the ocean. Uh. These explosions of sea saliva in Turkey

(37:17):
are probably caused, like I said, mostly by phytoplankton, which
are microscopic marine algae, and they are primary autotrophs in
the waters, so they are sort of the bottom level
of the food chain within ocean ecosystems. Their photosynthesizers, they're
they're the base of the food chain and the oceans,
but also producers of oxygen that allows water dwelling animals

(37:38):
to breathe. But when phytoplankton population surge, they can have
devastating effects on the ecosystems around them. And one way
that phytoplankton populations can surge and UH and existing phytoplankton
can produce an excess of mucus is when there are
certain imbalances of nutrient ants that are injected into natural waterways,

(38:03):
and specifically what I've seen called out here are the
nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus. Now, why would the Sea of
Marmara have especially high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. Well,
first of all, it is fed directly from the Black Sea,
which tends to be nutrient rich anyway, but it's also
fed by wastewater runoff from like twenty million people, which

(38:26):
would include untreated wastewater so like like sewage, but also
agricultural runoff which contains things like fertilizers. This can lead
to a chain reaction in which the phytoplankton sort of
become stressed, and under conditions of stress they exude mucus

(38:46):
or this this mucus like material that of course can
lead to these runaway conditions. Now, how exactly does this
process happen, Well, it's actually described very well in that
that Sarah Jong article in The Atlantic from from from
June twenty one. So she backs up to the starting
point that we already talked about with with marine snow.
You've got marine snow already in the water, but then

(39:09):
you've got these imbalances of nutrients that are largely caused
by uh, the untreated waste water and the agricultural runoff
that may contain fertilizers, and this leads the phytoplankton in
the water to produce copious mucus. The excess of mucus
then accumulates into these these things we mentioned earlier that

(39:31):
we're sometimes called stringers, the you know, these snot like strings,
and then that accumulates into clouds and then ends up
somehow floating up onto the surface becoming these sheets. Now,
one question is why do warm water and calm weather
conditions also contribute to marine mucilage build up well. It
goes like this. In the warmer months, the sun heats

(39:54):
up the top layer of the water column near the surface,
which causes increased stre ratification. So the warm layer of
water above the cold layers of water below, and the
cold layer of water is denser than the warm layer
of water, and salinity also affects. The saltier water is
denser than less salty water, which is why in really

(40:16):
salty bodies of water, like the dead Sea, it's easier
for things to float. It's because the water is denser,
but also cold water is denser. So mucus forms in
the top layer of the water where the photosynthesizing organisms,
the phytoplankton, are up near the top of the water.
They produced the mucus. After it's produced, the mucus starts
to sink, but because of the water column stratification, at

(40:40):
some point it hits dense cool water and stop sinking.
It just hangs around. And as it hangs around, it
starts to aggregate together and accumulate into these strings or clouds.
And here's where the third element comes in. I mentioned
I mentioned warm temperatures, the pollution, but also the calm
weather winds, and storms could normally come in to rough

(41:05):
up the waters and essentially tear up, churn up, forming
strings and clouds of mucus. But if the weather is
especially calm, that doesn't happen. For example, we talked about
how this was historically observed in the Adriatic Sea. The
Adriatic Sea tends to be relatively calm. Then after that
genres there are bacteria within all of this mucilage that

(41:27):
start to decompose it, and as they decompose it, they
release gases, forming bubbles within this accumulated matrix of mucus,
and then it floats to the top of the water
and collects in sheets on the surface. And one astounding
fact that Young mentioned is that quote in the Adriatic Sea,

(41:47):
the arm of the Mediterranean, just east of the Italian Peninsula,
the floating mucus can dry and toughen in the sun.
Seagulls are known to walk on it. So one of
the things about this, I mean, we're talking about this,
this overabundance of slime caused by these the by by

(42:12):
pollution changes in the environment. I mean it really you
really get the sense of like the mass uzing of
of the ocean's pus, you know, like the the the
using of a massive infection. Yeah, that's funny. One of
the articles I read it, though I don't recall which
one did cite a marine biologist, I think, or it
was some researcher in this area who was saying that

(42:34):
it's sort of like the ocean has the flu, and
this is this is the mucus coming out of its nose.
You know, it reflects a sort of general sickness in
the ecosystem due to h due to pollution, due to
changing temperatures, and and all that adding up together. Now,
of course it comes to the question of can anything
be done about this, about this cease not the plague

(42:56):
of mucus here. There are a few sort of levels
at which you could answer that question. One is, well,
can anything be done about it once it is here,
once it's all collected. I've read that Turkish authorities are
trying some possible solutions. In that that Washington Post article
I mentioned by Antonio Nuri Farson. She mentions that they
they have floated the idea of pun not intended of

(43:20):
dredging the seafloor as a way to possibly try to
remove some of it that has settled on on the bottom.
But they're also just vacuuming it up in the surface
from the surface, and we've seen that in some of
the images we talked about earlier, these photographs of these
workers with hoses just trying to suck up the slime
from near the coasts. Uh Farson writes, quote in is

(43:41):
mit workers have laboriously collected more than a hundred and
ten tons of the mucus, which was sent to an
incinerator for disposal. I wonder what it smells like downwind
of that incinerator. What what is the smell of grilled snot?
Oh man, this would be a good one for the ghostbusters,
right because it's this is the smell of having just
fired a proton pack uh into some sort of a

(44:04):
sline ectoplasm based organism or spiritual being fried ghost. Yes.
So there are you know, some things that people are
that they're trying to do, Turkish authorities are trying to do.
Now that this problem has already happened, the bigger question
would be how do you prevent it from happening in
future seasons. So one of the big things, obviously is

(44:26):
reducing pollution, reducing wastewater runoff into the Sea of Marmara,
reducing it into any c where this could happen um
and that would prevent these this build up, this imbalance
of nutrients that sets off this chain reaction by feeding
the phytoplankton like that, and there is some indication that
that could work. According to Jong's article, there is there's

(44:47):
every reason to think halting pollution could actually make a
difference in the following years because of what we've already
seen work in the Adriatic. See you remember the Adriatic
is where where these older reports from the eighteenth century
of the mare Sporko had taken place. And John Wrights
quote in the Adriatic uh Pusque Doo says, and that's
a researcher who was one of the authors of that

(45:08):
two thousand nine article, says that mucilage outbreaks have died
down since Italy began cleaning up the waste water that
flows into it. The sea has returned to what looks
like a healthier, less slimy normal. So it looks like
this sort of worked in the Adriatic, just stop polluting
the water as much. But there have been other things
that that have been mentioned in that that Guardian article

(45:30):
I was talking about earlier. It cites a researcher, damed
Dr nes leehan Os Deli Say, who is a marine
biologist at Istanbul University, and this researcher also mentions over fishing.
Stop over fishing, because fishing removes organisms that prey on
the phytoplankton and help keep it from getting out of control.

(45:50):
So it's kind of like how you know, you don't
want to take the wolves out of the park, right
because you could get an overabundance of prey animals. You
also don't want to take the fish that feed on
these autotrophs, take too many of them out of the waterways, right,
So so yeah, don't So we need to to not overfish,
We need to cut down on the amount of pollutants

(46:11):
that are leaking into these these bodies of water. And
uh well, I mean on top of that too, we
already pointed to climate change being an issue as well, right,
And as with so many issues, you end up seeing
and like, why is this weird thing happening in the
ocean right now? It seems like a large contributing macroscopic
factor in the background. Is climate change? Probably you know,
as the as the waters warm, that changes just all

(46:33):
kinds of complex interactions and the ecosystems, and so of
course climate change is really the the ultimate battle we
have to fight in the long term. But so I
guess that does it for me with the the specific
outbreak of marine mucilage in in the Sea of Marmara,
and I guess originally I was just captivated by that
that article in The Atlantic and the photographs that I

(46:54):
saw along with it, but it also this subject got
me thinking about how how slime, mucus and snot or
as we said earlier, fairly loose terms, and not every
kind of snot in the sea is identical or has
the same biochemical origin and when So when I was
searching around for other reports of different kinds of C.
Snot quote, one that I came across was a totally

(47:15):
different substance that was referred to by researchers with this term.
That was in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deep
Water Horizon oil spill. Yeah, yeah, this is the perfect
place to go, you know, having just discussed the horrors
of the oil age, um the ongoing horrors of the
oil age, because yeah, the deep Water Horizon spill gave

(47:36):
us a kind of a particular type of of slime,
so the deep Water Horizons spilled to refresh everyone. This was,
by many estimates, the largest marine oil spill in history.
It occurred on April in the Gulf of Mexico on
the BP operated Macondo Prospect Macondo Oil Prospect, and it
dumped an estimated four point nine million barrels I've also

(47:59):
seen I think the were earlier estimates four point one
million barrels UH into the Gulf of Mexico, in addition
to an estimated three hundred and sixty three thousand tons
of natural gas. It's a sort of unimaginable scale. Yeah,
and um, you know, as the name implies here, the
deep Water Horizon operated in deep water just beyond the

(48:21):
edge of the continental shelf. And we were both looking
at a paper from from Mark Shrope that was in
Nature back in eleven so in the you know, this
came out right afterwards. This was in the immediate period
of of of research, just a lot of researchers getting
involved in trying to figure out what is the damage.
You know that I think it was pretty quickly we

(48:43):
realized it was extensive, but but exactly what was the
damage to to the environment. And this article, which you
can look up it's available for free online, is titled
deep Wounds and and in that article, shrope Um points
out the collection and burning efforts UH only took care
of an estimated quarter of the liquid from the well.

(49:06):
The rest of it was dispersed into the sea in
small droplets uh in tar balls that formed some of
it was chemically dispersed, and some of it evaporated and
or dissolved. But short rights that researchers began to realize
pretty quickly that while some of the uh you know,
the surface shallow and coastal damage was the most obvious,

(49:27):
deep environments were hit really hard as well. The researchers
he talked to in the article describe a pervasive layer
of putrefied sediment containing dead sediment dwellers, you know, different
organisms and worms and the like, dead jellyfish from layers
above that had died and had drifted down and also
highly disrupted um or even just you know, council canceled

(49:50):
out microbial activity, so the result was kind of a
necro sludge. They did find some things that were still
technically alive in it. They pointed to some snails in particular,
but the snails were no longer moving. They weren't behaving
like living snails anymore, which just makes it all the
more creepy, and so of course it as a completely

(50:11):
different original cause. But this does remind me of the
images of the the sludge or the slime or the
mucus from these phytoplankton blooms settling down on the sea
floor in the Sea of Marmara and smothering organisms there. Yeah,
some of the descriptions were also sounded a lot like
what we're looking at here. Who's described as looking like cauliflower,

(50:34):
you know, as having this kind of this ghastly appearance. Now,
Scientists from the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem
Science Conference said that as much as one third of
the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster may have mixed
with deep ocean sediments and and here it risks lasting
damage to the two ecosystems and commercial fisheries. Researchers were reporting,

(50:57):
for instance, normally pink and lighter jelly's uh from further
up in the water column. They were found to be
black or brown, and so yeah, that the damage from
an event on this scale was this thought to extend
just throughout the water column. So certainly the surface, certainly
um on the on the the shore, but also deep down,

(51:18):
right down to the very bottom. Everything about that is
a truly sad and devastating story. But thinking about biological mucus,
I I do kind of come back to, despite you know,
all of the grossness that we've been talking about throughout
the middle of this episode, a kind of wonder um
about the ways that that tiny, you know, microscopically invisibly

(51:41):
microscopic organisms can so quickly, uh change the whole environment
with with just like releasing mucus or mucus like substances.
Obviously the effects are bad, but in a strange way,
I find something conceptually kind of beautiful about it, in
a way like the sky City comes first, Like if

(52:01):
you had a scenario, whether I a mythological creator, god
or goddess is sort of toy in around with different
ideas and and you know, one day they have something
and uh, one of their attendance comes and so what
do you what do you got there? And they're like, oh,
it's it's great. It's um, it's look at it. I
think I'm gonna call it slime. I'm gonna base an
entire ecosystem on this stuff. What do you think the

(52:21):
whole planet? And they're like, yeah, yeah, let's do it.
The mucus is the life. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's
one of the reasons why slime based creatures and monsters
sometimes resonate is that um is that we we realize
that this isn't this is this is life. You know,
this is this is a hallmark of life. That's why
the blob is is grim. That's why various slime creatures

(52:43):
are grim, because they're just an exaggeration of what we
see when we look closely at the world around us.
Maybe the same way that people watch crime shows and
anti heroes and all that and see people behaving badly
and kind of secretly see elements of the our own
personality that they kind of keep submerged throughout life but
are coming through in this character on the screen or

(53:05):
in the book. I wonder if it's similar like that,
but at a biological level. With with slime monsters, you
kind of you see that part of yourself. You kind
of see like, oh, this mass of floating mucus in
a way. That's kind of what That's what I am.
That's a big part of me. Oh man, you know,
I'm I'm smelling a new genre of podcast now. I
think we'll call it true slime, true slie. Yes, we'll

(53:28):
be pioneers. Yeah, that's got to already exist. Somebody has
already got a true slime and we'll go and like
I said, there's enough there. I think you could make
a podcast call it True Slime and just talk about
something slime related in every episode and you'd be good
to go. God, that sounds like it was made for me.
All right, Well we're gonna go ahead and close the

(53:50):
book on this one. But hey, if you want to
listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you know where to find us. Check out the Stuff
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(54:10):
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(54:31):
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(54:54):
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