[HN Gopher] New horror revealed in sargassum blob
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New horror revealed in sargassum blob
Author : reaperducer
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-05-30 19:53 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| turtleyacht wrote:
| Of course, nature wins again: paperclip maximization from _flesh-
| eating bacteria adapted to plastic._
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Some context: Vibrio and pseudomonas have long been known to be
| able to consume hydrocarbons and derivates. Not all vibrio or
| pseudomonads are pathogenic, much less flesh eating, only some
| of them.
| masklinn wrote:
| Yep, and given plastic is useful but pretty stable you'd
| expect adaptation to plastic would lead to discarding other
| niches. Like flesh-eating.
| [deleted]
| namaria wrote:
| The ape pattern is proving self destructive.
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| No it's not. Don't be a misanthrope.
|
| Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better for
| most of us on average.
|
| Be glad we're not an icy hellscape like Pluto. Or that we
| don't not exist.
| nosianu wrote:
| The next step when thinking along those lines should be to
| remember that linearity plays only a _temporary_ role in
| nature, until some threshold is reached of one or many
| developments, and things change.
|
| A look at the historic human population numbers on this
| planet, which _exploded_ to unseen heights only very
| recently (200 years or so), coupled with looking at the
| also vastly increased impact of every single person
| compared to far more spartan living ancient humans, might
| give one some ideas that extending past trends might be an
| especially bad idea in our times. Sure, we as a species
| lived through a lot for hundreds of thousands of years -
| but none of that past is of much use to predict our future.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better
| for most of us on average
|
| If you're freezing cold and start burning your living room
| everything also gets better and better, on average, for a
| while
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| On average. But the median is falling.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Every year gets better and better for most of us on
| average.
|
| So it also did in Rome until it all fell apart. True,
| things could be worse. But they could be a hell of a lot
| better too.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Pointing out humanity's flaws isn't being a misanthrope, we
| should strive not to fuck up our planet. Things are usually
| on an upwards trajectory, until they are not. When I have a
| company that is growing, there had better be some
| sustainability there, right? Today, there is _some
| evidence_ that humanity 's improvements used the
| environment as leverage, and the debt may have come due
| without the customer base to support it.
|
| edit: removed mixed metaphors
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > Every year gets better and better for most of us on
| average.
|
| No, it's not that "better". Life expectancy increase but
| stress increase, smartphone penetration grow as well as
| children working in mines, there's less and less food
| shortage but people eat crap and die from obesity.
| Meanwhile slums continues poping and growing everywhere -
| even in rich countries - and there's a ton more lung cancer
| even for non-smokers.
|
| Is it being misanthropic to point out what feels wrong in
| our world ? Not being mad or sad does not makes you more a
| humanity lover.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Pluto is a pretty low bar.
| skyechurch wrote:
| I'm so old I remember when Pluto was a planet, as good as
| Jupiter or any of them. Now, it's just a punch line.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| A cold, cold dwarf planet.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well the Holocene extinction event we are currently causing
| rivals the destructive power of supervolcanoes and asteroids
| in the number of species driven to extinction.
|
| Every time a species becomes so well adapted that it takes
| over the entire biosphere, it effectively wipes out most
| everything else. When land plants first evolved they did the
| opposite of what we're doing, turned all the CO2 into oxygen
| and killed 85% of all life.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| I cannot find it, but this reference wouldn't be misplaced in
| older science fiction works, where humans are templates of an
| advanced civilization's creation engine (along with other
| species that have evolved sentience).
|
| Or even from _Halo,_ although there humans are--spoiler
| spoiler spoiler-- "exalted."
| UberFly wrote:
| I don't know if we're at the tipping point yet, but when I read
| reports like this I feel like it's getting pretty damn close.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Alas, the psychological relief of knowing we're past some
| tipping point will likely never come. Even when we're quite far
| gone we'll still have a sliver of hope, and we'll magnify its
| probability in our imaginations the way we already magnify that
| of of complying with our current climate goals.
| scythe wrote:
| The article mentions the _Vibrio_ genus several times, but doesn
| 't mention that this is the genus of bacteria responsible for
| cholera, which may be helpful context in understanding what it
| does and what you may have heard about it before.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Honest question, can't we just mix gasoline or something similar
| with something that will make it float, pour it over the sargasso
| and then set it on fire?
|
| Edit: we control burn areas on land all the time. Why not on the
| ocean?
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Ah yes, just add petrochemicals and hope the environmental
| disaster gets better.
|
| Best bets to just leave it the fuck alone.
| jxf wrote:
| To be clear, you want to dump enough gasoline-napalm into the
| Atlantic Ocean to incinerate a 5,500-mile-long belt of
| something that's mostly submerged in water?
| ourmandave wrote:
| Well, it's either that or nuke the hurricane that washed it
| ashore. /s
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| It's an interesting thought experiment, and I think undeserving
| of downvotes.
|
| If you could get a bunch of balloons underneath the seaweed to
| float it above the water, maybe it would have a hope of burning
| -- but the balloons would have to withstand fire. Difficult.
|
| With a heroic effort maybe you could sweep the stuff onto a
| beach where it could burn. You'd burn a lot of fuel doing it,
| though, and then a lot of seaweed, and you wouldn't have
| changed the conditions that led to its growth in the first
| place.
| mintaka5 wrote:
| as a surfer, this scares the crap outta me.
| ahoy wrote:
| Here's the link to the Florida Atlantic University article that
| this piece summarizes
|
| https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/perfect-pathogen-storm
| sberens wrote:
| link to the study:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004313542...
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Biology is beating us over the head about how to address climate
| change.
|
| Grow more of it and sequester the remains.
| pmontra wrote:
| It reminds me of the algae in Benford's Timescape novel.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| That is a pretty horrifying prospect
|
| > "Another interesting thing we discovered is a set of genes
| called 'zot' genes, which causes leaky gut syndrome," said
| Mincer. "If a fish eats a piece of plastic and gets infected by
| this Vibrio, which then results in a leaky gut and diarrhoea,
| it's going to release waste nutrients such nitrogen and phosphate
| that could stimulate sargassum growth and other surrounding
| organisms."
| ricksunny wrote:
| Not sure I understand that particular concern of the
| researcher's - in the absence of such a development, what would
| you suppose happens to nitrogen & phosphorus that had been
| hitherto sequestered in the fish's body structure once it
| completes its lifecycle / becomes dinner for a bigger fish?
| Does it stay in progressively bigger fish species' biomass,
| forever? Do the fish ordinarily migrate away from the sargassum
| as they finish their lifecycle, depositing their bioaccumulated
| nitrogen & phophorus elsewhere?
| dflock wrote:
| They either get eaten, or fall to the ocean floor, ~4,000m
| down.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I don't know what they mean. Leaky gut is a hypothetical
| medical condition, not officially recognized, in which the
| intestines can absorb larger molecules than normal,
| compromising gut health.
|
| It doesn't necessarily automatically suggest diarrhea, though
| that can be one symptom or outcome.
|
| https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22724-leaky-g...
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I knew an old man who had a literally leaky gut. A liquid
| that smelled like pee somehow surfaced from his abdomen onto
| the skin. (He wasn't peeing on himself; if he had been it
| would have gotten other places, and it didn't.)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Not to suggest you shouldn't be concerned -- you absolutely
| should be -- but please note that the language in this article
| contains a _lot_ of qualifiers, like _could_ and _appears to._
|
| They don't really know what's going on and so they don't really
| know if this is all bad news or if there is some silver lining
| here of some sort, such as a potential means to get rid of
| plastics in the ocean.
|
| That possibility is not unprecedented. We use petroleum-eating
| microbes to help clean up oil spills in the ocean. Such microbes
| are typically harmless to humans.
|
| (Typically -- with the exception that people with cystic fibrosis
| sometimes die from infection with them though normal humans
| almost never get infected. To me, this implies people with CF
| likely retain petroleum products, including plastics, more than
| average.)
| hirundo wrote:
| A bacterium that can metabolize plastic, which is notoriously
| difficult to recycle, could be a biodegrading symbiote as well as
| a pathogen.
| hinkley wrote:
| Carrion eaters with the ability to digest plastic would help
| tremendously. Be they pupae or vultures.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Would really suck to have flesh eating bacteria thriving on
| basically everything in the world though.
| aeternum wrote:
| Organisms, especially bacteria tend to specialize, so
| evolution towards optimized plastic eating usually means
| evolution away from flesh eating.
|
| This is how the first vaccine was invented (and why we call
| them vaccines).
|
| >the doctor took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid's
| hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm
| of an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps.
|
| Cowpox was sufficiently evolved away from humans and towards
| cows that it was easy for the human immune system to fight,
| and provides antibody protection against the much more
| dangerous smallpox.
| yes_man wrote:
| Theres an astronomical figure of A Streptococcus bacteria on
| the human skin, and the same bacteria is responsible for most
| necrotizing fasciitis. But yet the disease is rare. So flesh
| eating bacteria is already thriving all over the world, it's
| just that infecting human tissue isn't trivial for bacteria
| masklinn wrote:
| Usually there's a limited amount of genetic material to
| leverage.
|
| If a bacteria adapts to eating plastic, you'd expect the rest
| to start degrading as it becomes unnecessary, and can be
| recycled to better plastic eating.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Going to be interesting that our great grandkids will have
| to deal with plastic rusting.
| roundandround wrote:
| Sounds like a variant on the 12 monkeys theme.
| owenmarshall wrote:
| Funny, my mind immediately went to Vonnegut.
|
| > There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a
| portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being
| closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes -
| and all the sea was ice-nine.
| pas wrote:
| finally, time to build the caves of steel!
| dmbche wrote:
| The issue here is that it is uncontrollable - it spreads easily
| and sticks to the plastic, from my understanding. This means
| that the side effects of the plastic eating are very
| widespread.
|
| If these bacterium are dangerous to life in the ocean, and they
| can be moved around on plastic particulate on top of spreading
| from fish, the implication for the oceanic ecosystem seems grim
| to me - if not the whole biosphere.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| The article says that the bacteria uses plastic but does it
| actually eat it?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Not from my reading. I think most of the commenters on this
| are mis-reading the article.
| cthalupa wrote:
| There are some bacteria that we are aware of that eat plastic
| - Rhodococcus ruber is probably the most prominent - but my
| understanding is that we are not aware of any vibrio bacteria
| that does, and that's what they're worried about in the
| sargassum.
| hirundo wrote:
| You're right, my bad, the article only says the bacteria
| attaches to the plastic.
| phkahler wrote:
| Hey, can we gather that blob, dry it, and burn it as fuel?
| culi wrote:
| well apparently there's a risk of having to interact with a
| bacteria that can eat both plastic and flesh...
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I thought these just attach to plastic. Eating plastic would
| be great news, right?
| pavlov wrote:
| Burning biomass isn't ideal when we're dealing with an
| atmospheric CO2 crisis.
|
| Maybe we should instead try to accelerate the blob's growth so
| it would absorb more CO2.
| x3874 wrote:
| > atmospheric CO2 crisis
|
| (citation needed)
| gishbunker wrote:
| Interestingly, pyrolizing biomass produces energy and solid
| carbon that can be sequestered. So while it produces less
| energy than burning biomass, it's energy positive and carbon
| negative if you bury the carbon output.
|
| So gathering and heating biomass as a resource isn't
| necessarily the wrong general idea.
| giarc wrote:
| Instead can it collect it and sink it to store the carbon?
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| This. Robotic sargassum farming and harvesting, followed by
| depositing remains in sacrificial oceanic trenches.
| twelve40 wrote:
| they do that with a fraction of it, but it's 5500 miles long
| (twice the width of the continental US for comparison) so
| yeah...
| dylan604 wrote:
| why is that a deterrent? just cut down into smaller size
| chunks just like we poke the earth full of holes to leak out
| the oil instead of sucking it out in one go.
| twelve40 wrote:
| likely because it costs a ton of money? but maybe is simply
| hasn't occurred to anyone who lives there for the last 10
| years
| TSiege wrote:
| A concern that's been in the back of mind for a while is, what if
| plastic isn't as long lasting as we think? To put another way,
| what is the carbon footprint of microorganisms evolving to eat
| it? Are we looking at another carbon bomb?
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| About 4% of oil is used to make plastic, so even if all the
| yearly output of plastic was converted to CO2 by microbes it
| would not be a huge increase.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Most organisms metabolize organic materials into methane, not
| CO2.
|
| Edit: > Direct methane emissions released to the atmosphere
| (without burning) are about 25 times more powerful than CO2
| in terms of their warming effect on the atmosphere.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-
| ca...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But building a pool, throwing in plastic and bacteria could
| be a good thing after all.
|
| Then just plant some trees to convert co2 into wood, then
| cut down the trees, make furniture, then dump furniture
| into oceans to make new oil.
|
| The circle of oil!
| kube-system wrote:
| But discarded plastic currently keeps CO2 from _all of the
| plastic ever made_ sequestered.
| pier25 wrote:
| It might be 4% of one year, but what about all the plastic
| produced in the last 70 years?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Here's the graph of global plastics production:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-
| plastics-p...
|
| It's an exponential curve. Most plastic made was made
| relatively recently. This is less obvious in the first
| world, where we've had consumer plastics for many decades.
| Most growth in plastic use happens outside the US.
| cthalupa wrote:
| My understanding is that 4% number is for the oil used in
| plastic production, which is not necessarily the amount of
| oil sequestered in the actual plastic.
|
| Conversely, I don't know if that number includes production
| from natural gas and not just crude oil, and a lot of
| plastic feedstock is made from it.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, it's gonna be similar in magnitude to 3 years. Not
| excellent, but not going to make a long run difference
| either.
|
| That's without looking at estimates of plastic production,
| but it's likely enough to be higher now than the majority
| of the 70 years.
| thsksbd wrote:
| For all the reasons to hate plastic in the oceans, I wouldn't
| worry about that. Think of the plastic full cycle, almost all
| plastic comes from oil, but almost all oil goes to energy
| production.
|
| Therefore what plastic makes it into the oceans represents a
| small fraction of the total carbon emissions.
|
| Besides, it appears to take a very long time to decay,
| significantly reducing the GHG potential of plastic
| Darkphibre wrote:
| Seems to me like the pathogen is just adapting to have a new
| transport mechanism? Rather than it decomposing or making use of
| microplastics.
|
| Rather than attaching to seaweed, it can also stick to
| microplastics and (hopefully) be ingested by marine wildlife. At
| least as I read the articles.
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