Your Wedding and the Seaweed Blobs
Your Wedding and the Seaweed Blobs
The Main Point: Your wedding is not affected:
The seaweed blobs do not affect Key Largo Lighthouse Weddings because we are on a north and west-facing shore. This seaweed comes to Florida yearly but never affects our Key Largo Lighthouse beaches, and you will not see, smell, or be affected by its presence.
Seaweed of this type is an annual event on all shores of Florida with a southern exposure.
This seaweed is not rare; it is fundamental to ocean life. It is in the news only because there is more of it this year than typical. Seaweed is an essential part of the ecosystem that provides food for many species. The blob of Sargassum weed is a perennial driver of the Atlantic food chain. Little creatures feed, grow, and hide in it on the surface, while bigger and bigger fish feed on its abundance up the food chain to large fish, including sharks. Fishermen purposely find these blobs because large predator fish dwell near these blobs of seaweed for their food supply.
Every year, big blobs of seaweed can reach the Florida Keys.
Don’t think that all south-facing beaches are filled with seaweed every year. Sargassum is randomly steered west by wind and tide to intermittently reach beaches from the U.S. Atlantic coast through the Caribbean and into the Gulf of Mexico shores from March through October as the 3,000-mile-wide Atlantic bloom migrates.