Algae swirling in the Gulf Coast is bringing a smelly odor to the air.
It’s happening around the waters of Matlacha.
“It’s almost a matted, matted surface that resembles a mud flat, but the colors are quite vibrant. And you can go from olives to Browns to cream colors, and then whites and sometimes even a little bit of orange mixed,” said Calusa Waterkeeper Capt.Codty Pierce. “When you smell it, you really smell a very heavy sulfur smell like rotten eggs. Sometimes it even smells like sewage.”
It floats up from the bottom of a water body in big floating patches and can pile up on a shoreline.
“I would say that its type of filamentous algae, perhaps maybe even dapis,” Pierce said.
The only way to know for sure exactly what it is, is to put it under a microscope.
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