cultural farms, from discharge of human waste, oil spills and other wastes.

These pollutants feed the excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria. At the same time, over fishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.

In Moreton Bay, Australia, Lyngbya majuscula (a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago) spreads across the seafloor every spring furiously. This weed, called Fireweed, when contacted by humans causes their skin to break out in searing welts, lips blistered and peeled, eyes burned and swelled shut. As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

Today this weed has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. Where this pattern is most pronounced, it evokes a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms, this is killing larger species and sickening people. Some of the most advanced forms of ocean life like fish, corals and marine mammals are struggling to survive while the most primitive like algae, bacteria and jellyfish are thriving and spreading.

It was often assumed that the damage caused to the Oceans was temporary & the seas will recover. However with the continued pollution of the high seas from varied sources has collectively altered the basic composition of the seas and made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water. The modern industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients (the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds) from industrial exhaust, from the vehicle exhausts, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and agri -