KILLER ALGAE

One man’s struggle to rid the Mediterranean of invading algae that have now spread from France to the coasts of Spain, Italy, and even Croatia. Meinesz (Biology/University of Nice), an algae specialist and diver, sounded the first alarm in the early 1980s, when a patch of Caulerpa taxifolia was found in waters beneath Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum. The algae, noted for their graceful fronds, had been used to adorn the museum’s aquaria and were flushed into the sea in ordinary maintenance. No one suspected that a tropical species could survive Mediterranean winter temperatures. But it did, and this grim chronology provides an exhausting but gripping account of what happened next. When Meinesz and his colleagues alerted museum officials, government agencies, and fellow scientists of the danger, museum officials refused to acknowledge culpability and accused Meinesz and Co. of being alarmists bent on obtaining more research funding. The algae are not in fact lethal to humans, but their prodigious ability to spread and choke off other flora and fauna threatens habitats and biodiversity. Meinesz sometimes overstates his case, especially in bitter concluding remarks inveighing against the media (which fanned the flames of fear or toadied to officials) and deploring the decline of research in the natural sciences in favor of reductionist molecular biology. Yet the press was useful in getting the word out, and without molecular genetics the nature of the mutant algae would not be known. Cleansing the Mediterranean of Caulerpa appears to be a lost cause, but with E.O. Wilson and other biologists speaking out on biodiversity and near-daily headlines about global threats to habitat or lethal diseases carried by invading organisms, we can hope that the lessons of ecology are not lost on the public. A textbook case of how not to manage an environmental disaster. (5 line drawings, 7 maps)