Doughnuts with the Prince

Andrew Sugden

Killer Algae: The True Tale of Biological Invasion by Alexandre Meinesz, translated by Daniel Simberloff
Chicago, 360 pp, £17.50, December 1999, ISBN 0 226 51922 8

In 1984, a small patch, no more than a metre square, of the tropical alga Caulerpa taxifolia was discovered in the Mediterranean – where it had never been seen before – growing on the sea-bed immediately below the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, then under Jacques Cousteau’s directorship. Five years later, the area of the patch had extended to a hectare. In July 1990, another colony of the same alga appeared at Cap Martin in France, 5 kilometres to the east, and in September of the same year it was found near Toulon, 150 kilometres to the west. In 1992, patches were discovered in the Balearics. By the following year, Caulerpa had spread to Italy, as far as the whirlpool of Scylla and Charybdis, and in 1994 it turned up in the coastal waters of Croatia. By the end of 1996, the alga had invaded and occupied 70 sites on the northern Mediterranean coast, spreading over a total area of more than thirty square kilometres and to a depth of more than a hundred metres.

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Vol. 22 No. 14 · 20 July 2000 » Andrew Sugden » Doughnuts with the Prince (print version)
pages 43-44 | 2958 words