July 21, 2008: Super Sucker

[xoxoxoBruce]

No, not your old flame, vacuum cleaner for coral reefs.

It sounds like a harebrained idea from some whacky movie: Seaweed overgrowing the reefs? Why not just suck it up with a vacuum?

But a team in Hawaii is using a device dubbed the Super Sucker to do just that, and new results presented at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suggest it might work.

Around the globe, the explosive growth of invasive and native seaweed species is wreaking economic and ecological damage. The Super Sucker was developed as a potential solution to the problem, which is blamed on overexploitation of algae-grazing fish and pollution from fertilisers.

To create the Super Sucker, biologists modified a system designed for gold dredging. Seaweed from reefs is sucked up and dumped onto mesh sorting tables on a barge. Native organisms inadvertently vacuumed are removed and returned to the reef and the seaweed is eventually used by farmers as fertiliser.

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