IT'S ALIVE ... sort of

As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says.
And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant.
Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map).
Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too—and lasting for months.
Until now, the light-brown "mucus" was seen as mostly a nuisance, clogging fishing nets and covering swimmers with a sticky gel—newspapers from the 1800s show beach-goers holding their noses, according to study leader Roberto Danovaro, director of the marine science department at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy.
But the new study found that Mediterranean mucilages harbor bacteria and viruses, including potentially deadly E. coli, Danovaro said. Those pathogens threaten human swimmers as well as fish and other sea creatures, according to the report, published September 16 in the journal PloS One.
Blobs Born of "Marine Snow"
A mucilage begins as "marine snow": clusters of mostly microscopic dead and living organic matter, including some life-forms visible to the naked eye—small crustaceans such as shrimp and copepods (copepod picture), for example.
Over time, the snow picks up other tiny hitchhikers, looking for a meal or safety in numbers, and may grow into a mucilage.
The blobs were first identified in 1729 in the Mediterranean, where they're most often seen. The sea's relative stillness and shallowness make the water column more stable, providing ideal conditions for mucilage formation.
Fish and other marine animals that have no choice but to swim with mucilages are most vulnerable to their disease-carrying bacteria, which can kill even large fish, the study says.

The noxious masses can also trap animals, coating their gills and suffocating them, Danovaro said.
And the biggest blobs can sink to the bottom, acting like a huge blanket that smothers life on the seafloor.


"It's a good example [of what will happen if] we don't do something to stop climate warming," Danovaro said. "There are consequences [if] we continue to deny the scientific evidence."
Beyond warm temperatures, it's still not exactly clear what drives the blobs' formation, Scripps' Azam pointed out. For instance, no one knows why the dead marine matter in the blobs doesn't decompose.
"It's important we do find out" what's driving the rise of the blobs, Azam said, "for the sake of the rest of the worlds' oceans."

“Sea blobs” or mass mucus conglomerations are forming along the coast of the Mediterranean, which is nothing new as the formations have been around since 1729. However the issue is that they are making a permanent residence. Caused by increased ocean temperatures, conglomerations of both dead organic matter and tiny creatures are forming into a big problem as research’s conducting studies on these blobs realize there is more to them than meets the eye. It’s like mother nature has a fever thanks to the failure of humans to keep her cool, and now she’s getting a cold…with a lot of mucus which in turn may harm aquatic life. The mucus membranes are thought to contain the bacteria E. coli, which is harmful to both humans and sea creatures alike. The blobs present an issue because they suffocate sea life and they are spreading. These mucus masses need to be studied much more in depth as researches are not sure why they do not decompose thus proving that there is no sure way to dispose of them without finding a way to regulate the temperatures of the Earth’s oceans.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html