625599 external_news 1567614472 1567614472 In the North Atlantic, there’s a region called a floating rain forest because of its incredible biodiversity. Known as the Sargasso Sea, the area takes its name from large mats of brown algae—Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans—that provide shelter, food, and breeding ground for fish, shrimps, birds, turtles, and crabs....Sargassum is a troublesome addition to new environs....Tourism has suffered....Joseph Montoya, a biological oceanographer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, collected nutrient data for the Science study. On a cruise out of Barbados in 2018, “we saw tremendous amounts of Sargassum all over the area, including in part of the Amazon plume region, where we had never seen Sargassum before,” he says....“Tourists don’t want to go to beaches that are thigh deep in Sargassum,” he says.

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