Times Report: Mexico Declares War on Seaweed

Here’s another piece from the New York Times. We have started sharing stories designated as “gifts” from our Times account. This one was first published on October 28, 2026. Use the link below.

By DAVID SHORTELL

Commander Álvaro Villanueva and his crew were a half mile off Mexico’s coast last month when they spotted their target: a mustard-brown seaweed known as sargassum that had massed to gargantuan size.

The Mexican Navy had been after this patch for hours, monitoring its approach via satellite and tailing it with a drone to help establish a closer heading.

Switching on conveyor belts that extended from the stern of the ship into the water, the crew began to haul in streams of seaweed, dumping it onto the hull, where workers packed it in with a bulldozer. It was one of the best days of the Mexican Navy’s sargassum-hunting season: more than 400 tons of seaweed removed in just a few hours.

The operation amounts to the front line of Mexico’s war on sargassum, declared earlier this year as the seaweed choked off the country’s tourism industry.“It all joins up and keeps growing,” Commander Villanueva said on another recent trip to sea. He stood on the bridge of his ship, the Natans, a one-time garbage collecting vessel that was retrofitted to suck sargassum out of the water. “We call them agglomerations when a cluster forms that’s the size of a soccer field.”

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Since spring, when the sargassum bloom begins an annual period of growth, thousands of tons of the seaweed have washed up on Mexico’s Caribbean shores every day, blighting a part of the country with an economy built on its turquoise water and powdery white sand.

With climate change helping to fuel a record expansion of the seaweed throughout the Caribbean and up the coast of the U.S. — reaching as far as North Carolina this summer — the Mexican efforts are being held up as a potential test case for a sustainable solution.

“Our beaches are filthy, the smell is horrendous,” Santia Bradshaw, Barbados’s minister of environment, national beautification and fisheries, said this month at a global sargassum conference in Cancún, the Mexican resort town. “Small island developing states need the support of our regional brothers and sisters.”

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Sargassum is a naturally occurring macroalgae that serves as a habitat for marine life in the North Atlantic. Christopher Columbus was the first to document its presence there on a voyage in 1492.

Since 2011, however, ocean currents and winds have swept the seaweed out of its home and into the open ocean, where ideal conditions — rising ocean temperatures, direct sunlight and abundant nutrients, including agricultural chemical runoff — have caused it to double in volume every five years. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, as the bloom is known, now stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil and the west coast of Africa.

“Nothing grows this fast,” said Chuanmin Hu, director of the Optical Oceanography Lab at the University of South Florida. “The territory has increased, meaning more countries suffer from sargassum today, and the intensity of sargassum inundation for a given region has also increased.”

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