The Plague of Mucus

In this 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Land, 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.

(00:25):
And I thought maybe a 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

(00:46):
the surf. Do do you 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, mis called
as I ebbed with the Ocean of Life. The whole
poem is too long to read, but I'm just going
to read for the fourth section here, where he really
talks about becoming the use ebb ocean of life, The
flow will return. Cease, not your moaning, you fierce old mother,

(01:10):
endlessly cry for your castaways. But fear not deny, not me, rustle,
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. Loose wind rows, little corpses,

(01:33):
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 the storm, the long calm,
the darkness, the swell, musing, pondering a breath, a briny tear,

(01:58):
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 much for us that sobbing
dirge of nature. Just as much whence we come that
blair of the cloud trumpets, we capricious, brought hither we

(02:21):
know not WinCE spread out before you. You up there
walking or sitting, whoever you are, we two lie in
drifts at your feet. Oh man, Whitman. Uh. 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

(02:42):
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 you
can tell he still has that universal connectedness perspective. 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

(03:04):
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. 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

(03:24):
sludge like dark world of 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 has just crabs. It's like, remember
those those big like arthropod 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

(03:47):
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 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

(04:09):
looking up, like, what was what's a nice slimy ocean
bit from Clark Ashton Smith? And I found a really
good one from a story titled The Light 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,

(04:29):
the fisher folk who dwelt in wattle huts below the
tall towers of far Azan went forth daily in their
coracles of hide and willow, and cast their nets in
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

(04:50):
from the trans Arctic ice. And they drew forth from
their signs. Living monsters as well, such as the eldest captains,
had never beheld things triple headed and tailed and thinned
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

(05:13):
about them, or things leprous side and bearded with stiffly
using slime. It was as if some transdimensional and long
blocked channel beneath the known familiar seas of Earth had
opened suddenly into the strange waters of ultra mundane oceans,
teeming with repulsive and malformed life. Wow, well that goes

(05:35):
to 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 ultramundane,
that just sounds like even more mundane than usual. It
actually means the opposite. Ultra mundane means like from beyond
the solar system. Oh. I would not have known that. Yeah,
it threw me for your curve at first, because I'm like, oh,

(05:56):
the ultramundane man that must be and that's that's just supermunday,
but now especially average. But anyway, on these themes of
slime and mucus, it got me thinking about this question,
like what does life from the microscopic level to the
plants and the megafauna all have in common. Well, one

(06:18):
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 of the
keystones of organic life. I was thinking about how, uh,
there was one time when I was in high school

(06:38):
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,
this 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

(07:01):
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 ouzy 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,
I mean, we could easily do an entire podcast series,

(07:22):
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 utilize slime so well. Um,
the hag fish, for example, that we've discussed numerous times
a true wizard of slime um, a sorcerer of uze

(07:44):
that that is able to to to utilize this uh,
this this thick, slimy substance that it that it exudes um,
you know, so 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.
Another big one is the slime that you encounter as

(08:08):
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 catching
and releasing, if you're disrupting that that outer layer, you're
disrupting some of the protections afforded to the organism. Now,

(08:29):
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
of parts, so you But of course, I guess one
thing we should recognize is that we are speaking kind

(08:51):
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 by
a chemical pathways always uh, you know, they come from
different kinds of life. But in this loose sense, almost
all life has some kind of slime or or ooz
or goo or mucus. In common life just kind of

(09:13):
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 the body, not merely uh, floating around

(09:34):
in little tiny clumps in the ocean, 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. And this article is about an

(09:56):
organic substance that has been referred to in the scientific
terature as marine mucilage, but it is more commonly known
to uh people in the fishing industry and people who
have encountered it firsthand as things like see snot or
see saliva. And the article is about how this stuff
has lately become an absolute plague near the shores of Turkey,

(10:21):
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 G n C on the west
to the Black Sea on the on the northeast. And
so if you have not already read any articles about
this stuff or seen pictures of it, this one is
really worth looking up to see with your own eyes.

(10:42):
In fact, there is an astonishing photo gallery on the
website of The Atlantic right now. It was posted June
one called photos Turkey ce snot 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 go look it up right now,
and Rob, I've got these here for you to look

(11:02):
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 people used to make tie dye
t shirts. Except instead of all the colors of the rainbow,

(11:26):
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. 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

(11:47):
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 hips and boats. Well,
another way I 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

(12:09):
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. 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

(12:31):
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 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

(12:55):
next image is of a diver surfacing from under neath
a large mat of marine mucilage. This one was taken
by Sir Haat Kagdas for 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

(13:16):
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 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
pork raman broth. All of the scum that rises to

(13:39):
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, except add into
that like some wilted toilet paper and alo vera gel. Yeah,
that that is a good description um. Another way might
be to imagine if you've filled a crop pot like

(14:02):
a pressure cooker with cauliflower and then cooked it way
too long where you just turned it 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

(14:22):
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 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

(14:45):
that they used to retrieve samples from the water would
end up churning it up and shaking it up. 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 Costcoon, also for

(15:06):
the Nadolu agency, and uh, it's an underwater photo of
a diver in the Sea of Marmara near at 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

(15:30):
that it looks kind of like, you know, crewman Hicks
has wandered into an alien spider web. And so there's
just this translucent matrix of goop enveloping everything spun right
out of the she lob of the sea. Yeah, and
I guess it drives home. You can't tell, really tough
on the image how deep the individual is, but yet

(15:51):
you certainly get the sense that this is not a
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

(16:11):
that as we go on. One last photo I thought
we should look at before we move on, Rob. Is
this one of workers trying to vacuum this stuff up
with hoses? I think this is again nearest stenbul Uh
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,

(16:34):
or big cat vomit, A lot of cat vomit. Maybe, oh,
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. One of the
articles I was reading about this had a really good
physical description. It was by Selene Ugertash, writing for the

(16:59):
The for The Guardian in May 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.

(17:22):
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 known 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

(17:44):
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're drifting around.
But then when when the marine muselage starts to accumulate,
you've got these things called stringers, which she's says resemble
a kind of sticky goo. This is more actually similar

(18:05):
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

(18:28):
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 in Turkey 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

(18:50):
this stuff, and it's not the first time it has happened.
But the slime infestation at Marmora is especially bad this year,
and the problem does seemed 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

(19:11):
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 PLS

(19:32):
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 eighteen century the author's
right quote. Worldwide, the highly productive and shallow Adriatic Sea,

(19:53):
and particularly it's a northern portion within the Mediterranean Basin,
is the area most severely affected by the out break
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

(20:13):
would be mare Sporco, 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,
Mari Sporko hanging out with you know, the very with

(20:34):
the malacoda and all Malo Bronco or I might be
getting that name wrong. Bronco. Yeah, there's Malacoda 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

(20:57):
just kind of a roughly humanoid form made out of
this cease, not that we're describing, That's the way I'm
picturing it. Yeah, So outbreaks of cease not, 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

(21:17):
the frequency 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

(21:39):
three months, 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

(22:03):
kind of like, 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

(22:25):
for kilometers 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

(22:47):
and fisheries. And a noteier 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 see floor organisms and
plankton that just float with the currents. So several bad
things about it. Obviously, it's bad for the local wildlife

(23:07):
because it can 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 talks about how boats sometimes can't

(23:32):
go to sea when there's all this mucus 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 and then the engine can't work. Yeah. So,
not even getting into how little you want to swim

(23:56):
in these waters, it impacts your ability to go out
in a boat and ish 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 sea floor or 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

(24:17):
just dead and smothered by this sea snot. They have
turned a kind of palid shade and are I don't
know what exactly about it killed them. Perhaps it's smothered
them or interfered with their ability to breathe, or maybe
it's uh it going 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

(24:39):
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 it's excellent photography, but it is
capturing something that is rather ghastly and disturbed. Thank you. Now,

(25:02):
we mentioned that a lot of the older documented outbreaks
of of marine mucilage mentioned in that two thousand nine
paper in PS one, we're in the Adriatic Sea, which
is of course different than 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

(25:25):
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 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,

(25:48):
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 on is it makes the
nets too heavy, as it like sort 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

(26:10):
imagine how it would turn a net into a parachute
made out of netting and slime. Yeah. Gross. And another
thing is I actually saw this claim cited 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 these not infested waters

(26:34):
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, 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

(26:56):
that article in The Guardian by Sillan you Gurtash and
and this one um this one refers to a scientist
named Dr Barish ot Salp who is a marine biologist
at the China cal A Osakes Mart University. And uh
this researcher was diving to look at corals off the

(27:16):
China cal A straight and notice the extent of the
sea saliva underneath the water and points out that it's
especially dangerous to immobile animals along the bottom of the ocean,
like coral. Uh So, so Dr ot Salp here found
that that the gold coral or Savalia savaglia and the

(27:37):
violeescent sea whip or Para murissa clavada were the most
armed by the cease not bloom. And then near the shoreline,
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
out of disruption here, it's it's you know, we recently

(28:00):
talked about the sargasm weed and and uh, and large
quantities of that that that at times become a problem
for coastal communities, and and and actually creating some of
the same problems we've discussed here, making it difficult to
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

(28:25):
is still an environment that things are thriving in. And
this this seems like more of a total disruption of
all 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

(28:47):
is this stuff physically, Like what is it and how
is it formed? So here I'm turning back to that
study from two thousand nine in p o OS one
by den O Varro at all, and the way they
explain it is that marine mucilage 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

(29:10):
as quote amorphous aggregates with the size ranging from a
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

(29:31):
top of the water column where you've got the photosynthesizing organisms,
you know, they make energy from from sunlight, 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

(29:51):
water column who are not able to produce energy from sunlight.
And of course that processes is, as they say, ubiquitous
in the oceans of the world. It's it's everywhere. But
then they write quote water columns stratification, So that's the
forming of these layers in the water column. Water column
stratification under summer conditions favors the progressive coalescence of small

(30:16):
sized aggregates into large, massive sheets, thin layers, flocks, 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.

(30:38):
Now we'll come back to the exact mechanics of how
those aggregates form in the water column. But yeah, 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,

(30:58):
and they start to stick together and form these huge masses,
and those masses become marine mucilage, again the 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

(31:20):
marine organisms through different processes including phytoplankton exudation of photosynthetically
derived carbohydrates produced under stressful conditions. Uh. 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

(31:42):
extracellular enzymes, leading to the release and accumulation of large
molecular weight compounds in the system. Uh so, 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

(32:03):
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. 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

(32:25):
is a is a habitat. Uh. The authors here right
quote these processes can be associated with viral infections 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

(32:45):
alleging is that the build up a marine mucilage essentially
forms a habitat for potentially pathogenic bacteria and viruses. So
e coal I 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

(33:07):
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
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

(33:32):
an urban population that some museum in Istanbul imported a
painting of Vigo the Carpathian and uh yeah, and everybody
in the city started being mean to each other. And
then this is what you get, alright, 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

(33:54):
in Ghostbusters two. Yeah, they charged the slime with good
vibes by having everybody dance to that song and out
and they shoot it and they shoot it out of
the guns. Yeah, they defeat they defeat Vigo with good vibes.
That was that was you know, say what you about
Ghostbusters two, but it leaned into the slime, like I'm
guessing Ackroyd and Raymison they were like, well, what worked

(34:14):
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, I forget that name of that actor talking
to him. Oh yeah, he's a German actor that played
the actual Vigo Um a former boxer, kind of a

(34:35):
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 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.

(34:56):
He was also in die Hard, Oh and die Hard.
Oh was he one of the villains. Oh I almost
I am almost certain he was. Yeah, I don't think
this is a kind of guy who played anything. But wait,
it wasn't the police chief who was also in the
breakfast club. I can't imagine this guy every play police chief,
not not in the US anyway, Maybe he played police
chief and I could see him playing a cop like

(35:17):
in a German show. So it's possible. No, I was
joking it was not that guy at don't I forget
his name, but that guy's that guy. Everybody knows that guy. Yeah, okay, anyway, sorry,
we gotta come back to So the causes the causes
of marine mucilage um, so across everything I was reading,
there are three main causes that have been uh put

(35:38):
forth as the probable primary explanations of what's going on
with this with this cease and outbreak. And these causes are,
and I'll explain each of these as we go on.
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

(36:04):
grow more at higher temperatures, and phytoplankton seems to be
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

(36:25):
degrees warmer than average after a very mild winter, And
of course, uh, there's just continuous warming of the oceans
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.

(36:45):
That can cause really bad things to happen downstream in
the ocean. Uh. These explosions of sea saliva in Turkey
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

(37:08):
they're the base of the food chain and the oceans,
but also producers of oxygen that allows water dwelling animals
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

(37:29):
can produce an excess of mucus is when there are
certain imbalances of nutrients that are injected into natural waterways,
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,

(37:50):
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 for um like twenty million people,
which would include untreated wastewater so like like sewage, but
also agricultural runoff which contains things like fertilizers. This can

(38:13):
lead to a chain reaction in which the phytoplankton sort
of become stressed and under conditions of stress they exude
mucus 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

(38:35):
from June twenty one. So she backs up to the
starting point that we already talked about with with marines snow.
You've got marine snow already in the water, but then
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

(38:57):
the water to produce copious mucus. The excess of mucus
then accumulates into these these things we mentioned earlier that
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,

(39:18):
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
up the top layer of the water column near the surface,
which causes increased stratification. So the warm layer of water

(39:38):
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 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

(40:02):
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 some point
it hits dense cool water and stop sinking. It just
hangs around, and as it hangs around, it starts to

(40:24):
aggregate together and accumulate into these strings or clouds. And
here's where the third element comes in. I mentioned h
I mentioned warm temperatures, the pollution, but also the calm weather.
Winds and storms could normally come in to rough up
the waters and essentially tear up, churn up forming strings

(40:44):
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 start to
decompose it, and as they decompose it, they release gases,

(41:08):
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
Jong mentioned is the quote in the Adriatic Sea, the
arm of the Mediterranean, just east of the Italian Peninsula,
the floating mucus can dry and toughen in the sun.

(41:30):
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
pollution changes in the environment. I mean, it really really

(41:51):
get the sense of like the mass ouzing of of
the ocean's pus, you know, like the the the zing
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 it's
sort of like the ocean has the flu and this

(42:13):
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
of mucus here. There are a few sort of levels

(42:34):
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 Nouri Farzan. She mentions that they
they have floated the idea of pun not intended of

(42:55):
dredging the sea floor as a way to possibly try
to remove some of it 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 farce On writes quote in

(43:16):
ismt 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

(43:37):
a proton pack uh into some sort of a slime
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

(43:58):
future seasons. So one of the big things, obviously is
reducing pollution, reducing wastewater runoff into the Sea of Marmara,
reducing it into any sea where this could happen um,
and that would prevent the 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

(44:19):
that could work. According to Jong's article, there is there's
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 Sporco had taken place. And John Wrights

(44:39):
quote in the Adriatic uh pusque Do says, and that's
a researcher who was one of the authors of that
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 stopped polluting

(44:59):
the wa better as much. But there have been other
things that have been mentioned in that that Guardian article
I was talking about earlier. It cites a researcher, damed
Dr nes leyhan 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

(45:23):
the phytoplankton and help keep it from getting out of control.
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 autotrophes, take too many of them out of the waterways, right,
So so yeah, don't So we need to do not
over fish. We need to cut down on the amount

(45:45):
of pollutants 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,

(46:05):
as the as the waters warm, that changes just all
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

(46:27):
that article in the Atlantic and the photographs that I
saw along with it. But it also this subject got
me thinking about how how slime, mucus and snot are,
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

(46:48):
snot quote, one that I came across was a totally
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

(47:11):
us a kind of a particular type of of slime.
So the deep part of 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

(47:34):
I've also seen I think these 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

(47:57):
edge of the continental shelf. And we were both looking
at a paper from from Mark shrope that was in
Nature back in twleven, 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 pretty quickly we realized

(48:19):
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. The

(48:42):
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
rites that researchers began to realize pretty quickly that while
some of the uh, you know, the surf, a shallow
and coastal damage was the most obvious, deep environments were

(49:04):
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, counseled canceled out microbial activity.

(49:28):
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 different original cause. But

(49:49):
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 is described as looking like cauliflower, you know,

(50:10):
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 Deep Water 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,

(50:33):
for instance, normally pink and lighter jellies from from further
up in the water column that 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 right down to the very bottom. Everything about that

(50:57):
is a truly sad and devastating story. But thinking about
biological mucus, 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 uh tiny you know, microscopically,
invisibly microscopic organisms can so quickly, uh change the whole

(51:22):
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. Well,
in a way like the viscosity comes first, Like if
you had a scenario, whether I a mythological creator god
or gods is sort of toy in around with different

(51:44):
ideas and and you know, one day they have something
and one of their tendance 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
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

(52:07):
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 verious slime creatures
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

(52:29):
anti heroes and all that and see people behaving badly
and kind of secretly see elements of their own personality
that they kind of keep submerged throughout life but are
coming through in this character on the screen or 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

(52:50):
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 podcas ask now, I think
we'll call it true slime. True slime. Yes, we'll be pioneers. Yeah,
that's gotta already exist. Somebody has already got a true slim.
Surely we'll go and like I said, there's enough there.

(53:12):
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 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 to Blow your Mind
podcast feed. You can find that. Wherever you get your podcast,

(53:36):
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Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays listener Man on Monday's uh,
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(53:59):
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(54:25):
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