Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This ‘rise of slime,’ as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.

The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

“It comes up like little boils,” said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. “At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked.”

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn’t eat solid food for a week. Others made an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash the residue from their hands before relieving themselves over the sides of their boats.

For a time, embarrassment kept them from talking publicly about their condition. When they finally did speak up, authorities dismissed their complaints — until a bucket of the hairy weed made it to the University of Queensland’s marine botany lab.

Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so strong that professors and students ran out of the building and into the street, choking and coughing.

Scientist Judith O’Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.

O’Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar with these ancient life forms, but had never seen this particular kind before. What was it doing in Moreton Bay? Why was it so toxic? Why was it growing so fast?

The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world’s oceans.

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing “the rise of slime.”

For many years, it was assumed that the oceans were too vast for humanity to damage in any lasting way. “Man marks the Earth with ruin,” wrote the 19th century poet Lord Byron. “His control stops with the shore.”

Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical discharges and other industrial accidents heightened awareness of man’s capacity to injure sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary.

But over time, the accumulation of environmental pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas.

The causes are varied, but collectively they have made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water.

Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients — the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes.

Modern industry and agriculture produce more fixed nitrogen — fertilizer, essentially — than all natural processes on land. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day.

These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.

At the same time, overfishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.

The consequences are evident worldwide.

Off the coast of Sweden each summer, blooms of cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a stinking, yellow-brown slush that locals call “rhubarb soup.” Dead fish bob in the surf. If people get too close, their eyes burn and they have trouble breathing.

On the southern coast of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, high tide leaves piles of green-brown algae that smell so foul condominium owners have hired a tractor driver to scrape them off the beach every morning.

On Florida’s Gulf Coast, residents complain that harmful algae blooms have become bigger, more frequent and longer-lasting. Toxins from these red tides have killed hundreds of sea mammals and caused emergency rooms to fill up with coastal residents suffering respiratory distress.

North of Venice, Italy, a sticky mixture of algae and bacteria collects on the Adriatic Sea in spring and summer. This white mucus washes ashore, fouling beaches, or congeals into submerged blobs, some bigger than a person.

Along the Spanish coast, jellyfish swarm so thick that nets are strung to protect swimmers from their sting.

Organisms such as the fireweed that torments the fishermen of Moreton Bay have been around for eons. They emerged from the primordial ooze and came to dominate ancient oceans that were mostly lifeless. Over time, higher forms of life gained supremacy. Now they are under siege.

Like other scientists, Jeremy Jackson, 63, was slow to perceive this latest shift in the biological order. He has spent a good part of his professional life underwater. Though he had seen firsthand that ocean habitats were deteriorating, he believed in the resilience of the seas, in their inexhaustible capacity to heal themselves.

Then came the hurricane season of 1980. A Category 5 storm ripped through waters off the north coast of Jamaica, where Jackson had been studying corals since the late 1960s. A majestic stand of staghorn corals, known as “the Haystacks,” was turned into rubble.

Scientists gathered from around the world to examine the damage. They wrote a paper predicting that the corals would rebound quickly, as they had for thousands of years.

“We were the best ecologists, working on what was the best-studied coral reef in the world, and we got it 100% wrong,” Jackson recalled.

The vividly colored reef, which had nurtured a wealth of fish species, never recovered.

“Why did I get it wrong?” Jackson asked. He now sees that the quiet creep of environmental decay, occurring largely unnoticed over many years, had drastically altered the ocean.

As tourist resorts sprouted along the Jamaican coast, sewage, fertilizer and other nutrients washed into the sea. Overfishing removed most of the grazing fish that kept algae under control. Warmer waters encouraged bacterial growth and further stressed the corals.

For a time, these changes were masked by algae-eating sea urchins. But when disease greatly reduced their numbers, the reef was left defenseless. The corals were soon smothered by a carpet of algae and bacteria. Today, the reef is largely a boneyard of coral skeletons.

Many of the same forces have wiped out 80% of the corals in the Caribbean, despoiled two-thirds of the estuaries in the United States and destroyed 75% of California’s kelp forests, once prime habitat for fish.

Jackson uses a homespun analogy to illustrate what is happening. The world’s 6 billion inhabitants, he says, have failed to follow a homeowner’s rule of thumb: Be careful what you dump in the swimming pool, and make sure the filter is working.

“We’re pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution,” Jackson said, “a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria.”

The 55-foot commercial trawler working the Georgia coast sagged under the burden of a hefty catch. The cables pinged and groaned as if about to snap.

Working the power winch, ropes and pulleys, Grovea Simpson hoisted the net and its dripping catch over the rear deck. With a tug on the trip-rope, the bulging sack unleashed its massive load.

Plop. Splat. Whoosh. About 2,000 pounds of cannonball jellyfish slopped onto the deck. The jiggling, cantaloupe-size blobs ricocheted around the stern and slid down an opening into the boat’s ice-filled hold.

The deck was streaked with purple-brown contrails of slimy residue; a stinging, ammonia-like odor filled the air.

“That’s the smell of money,” Simpson said, all smiles at the haul. “Jellyballs are thick today. Seven cents a pound. Yes, sir, we’re making money.”

Simpson would never eat a jellyfish. But shrimp have grown scarce in these waters after decades of intensive trawling. So during the winter months when jellyfish swarm, he makes his living catching what he used to consider a messy nuisance clogging his nets.

It’s simple math. He can spend a week at sea scraping the ocean bottom for shrimp and be lucky to pocket $600 after paying for fuel, food, wages for crew and the boat owner’s cut.

Or, in a few hours of trawling for jellyfish, he can fill up the hold, be back in port the same day and clear twice as much. The jellyfish are processed at the dock in Darien, Ga., and exported to China and Japan, where spicy jellyfish salad and soup are delicacies.

“Easy money,” Simpson said. “They get so thick you can walk on them.”

Jellyfish populations are growing because they can. The fish that used to compete with them for food have become scarce because of overfishing. The sea turtles that once preyed on them are nearly gone. And the plankton they love to eat are growing explosively.

As their traditional catch declines, fishermen around the world now haul in 450,000 tons of jellyfish per year, more than twice as much as a decade ago.

This is a logical step in a process that Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, calls “fishing down the food web.” Fishermen first went after the largest and most popular fish, such as tuna, swordfish, cod and grouper. When those stocks were depleted, they pursued other prey, often smaller and lower on the food chain.

“We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton,” Pauly said.

In California waters, for instance, three of the top five commercial catches are not even fish. They are squid, crabs and sea urchins.

This is what remains of California’s historic fishing industry, once known for the sardine fishery attached to Monterey’s Cannery Row and the world’s largest tuna fleet, based in San Diego, which brought American kitchens StarKist, Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea.

Overfishing began centuries ago but accelerated dramatically after World War II, when new technologies armed industrial fleets with sonar, satellite data and global positioning systems, allowing them to track schools of fish and find their most remote habitats.

The result is that the population of big fish has declined by 90% over the last 50 years.

It’s reached the point that the world’s fishermen, though more numerous, working harder and sailing farther than ever, are catching fewer fish. The global catch has been declining since the late 1980s, an analysis by Pauly and colleague Reg Watson showed.

The reduction isn’t readily apparent in the fish markets of wealthy countries, where people are willing to pay high prices for exotic fare from distant oceans — slimeheads caught off New Zealand and marketed as orange roughy, or Patagonian toothfish, renamed Chilean sea bass. Now, both of those fish are becoming scarce.

Fish farming also exacts a toll. To feed the farmed stocks, menhaden, sardines and anchovies are harvested in great quantities, ground up and processed into pellets.

Dense schools of these small fish once swam the world’s estuaries and coastal waters, inhaling plankton like swarming clouds of silvery vacuum cleaners. Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, used to be clear, its waters filtered every three days by piles of oysters so numerous that their reefs posed a hazard to navigation. All this has changed.

There and in many other places, bacteria and algae run wild in the absence of the many mouths that once ate them. As the depletion of fish allows the lowest forms of life to run rampant, said Pauly, it is “transforming the oceans into a microbial soup.”

Jellyfish are flourishing in the soup, demonstrating their ability to adapt to wholesale changes — including the growing human appetite for them. Jellyfish have been around, after all, at least 500 million years, longer than most marine animals.

In the Black Sea, an Atlantic comb jelly carried in the ballast water of a ship from the East Coast of the United States took over waters saturated with farm runoff. Free of predators, the jellies gorged on plankton and fish larvae, depleting the fisheries on which the Russian and Turkish fleets depend. The plague subsided only with the accidental importation of another predatory jellyfish that ate the comb jellies.

Federal scientists tallied a tenfold increase in jellies in the Bering Sea in the 1990s. They were so thick off the Alaskan Peninsula that fishermen nicknamed it the Slime Bank. Researchers have found teeming swarms of jellyfish off Georges Bank in New England and the coast of Namibia, in the fiords of Norway and in the Gulf of Mexico. Also proliferating is the giant nomurai found off Japan, a jellyfish the size of a washing machine.

Most jellies are smaller than a fist, but their sheer numbers have gummed up fishing nets, forced the shutdown of power plants by clogging intake pipes, stranded cruise liners and disrupted operations of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan.

Of the 2,000 or so identified jellyfish species, only about 10 are commercially harvested. The largest fisheries are off China and other Asian nations. New ones are springing up in Australia, the United States, England, Namibia, Turkey and Canada as fishermen look for ways to stay in business.

Pauly, 60, predicts that future generations will see nothing odd or unappetizing about a plateful of these gelatinous blobs.

“My kids,” Pauly said, “will tell their children: Eat your jellyfish.”

The dark water spun to the surface like an undersea cyclone. From 80 feet below, the swirling mixture of partially treated sewage spewed from a 5-foot-wide pipe off the coast of Hollywood, Fla., dubbed the “poop chute” by divers and fishermen.

Fish swarmed at the mouth — blue tangs and chubs competing for particles in the wastewater.

Marine ecologist Brian Lapointe and research assistant Rex “Chip” Baumberger, wearing wetsuits and breathing air from scuba tanks, swam to the base of the murky funnel cloud to collect samples. The effluent meets state and federal standards but is still rich in nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients.

By Lapointe’s calculations, every day about a billion gallons of sewage in South Florida are pumped offshore or into underground aquifers that seep into the ocean. The wastewater feeds a green tide of algae and bacteria that is helping to wipe out the remnants of Florida’s 220 miles of coral, the world’s third largest barrier reef.

In addition, fertilizer washes off sugar cane fields, livestock compounds and citrus farms into Florida Bay.

“You can see the murky green water, the green pea soup loaded with organic matter,” said Lapointe, a marine biologist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Fla. “All that stuff feeds the algae and bacterial diseases that are attacking corals.”

Government officials thought they were helping in the early 1990s when they released fresh water that had been held back by dikes and pumps for years. They were responding to the recommendations of scientists who, at the time, blamed the decline of ocean habitats on hypersalinity — excessively salty seawater.

The fresh water, laced with farm runoff rich in nitrogen and other nutrients, turned Florida’s gin-clear waters cloudy. Seaweed grew fat and bushy.

It was a fatal blow for many struggling corals, delicate animals that evolved to thrive in clear, nutrient-poor saltwater. So many have been lost that federal officials in May added what were once the two most dominant types — elkhorn and staghorn corals — to the list of species threatened with extinction. Officials estimate that 97% of them are gone.

Sewage and farm runoff kill corals in various ways.

Algae blooms deny them sunlight essential for their survival.

The nutrients in sewage and fertilizer make bacteria grow wildly atop corals, consuming oxygen and suffocating the animals within.

A strain of bacteria found in human intestines, Serratia marcescens, has been linked to white pox disease, one of a host of infectious ailments that have swept through coral reefs in the Florida Keys and elsewhere.

The germ appears to come from leaky septic tanks, cesspits and other sources of sewage that have multiplied as the Keys have grown from a collection of fishing villages to a stretch of bustling communities with 80,000 year-round residents and 4 million visitors a year.

Scientists discovered the link by knocking on doors of Keys residents, asking to use their bathrooms. They flushed bacteria marked with tracers down toilets and found them in nearby ocean waters in as little as three hours.

Nearly everything in the Keys seems to be sprouting green growths, even an underwater sculpture known as Christ of the Abyss, placed in the waters off Key Largo in the mid-1960s as an attraction for divers and snorkelers. Dive-shop operators scrub the bronze statue with wire brushes from time to time, but they have trouble keeping up with the growth.

Lapointe began monitoring algae at Looe Key in 1982. He picked the spot, a 90-minute drive south of Key Largo, because its clear waters, colorful reef and abundance of fish made it a favorite site for scuba divers. Today, the corals are in ruins, smothered by mats of algae.

Although coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, they are home to at least 2 million species, or about 25% of all marine life. They provide nurseries for fish and protect oceanfront homes from waves and storm surges.

Looe Key was once a sandy shoal fringed by coral. The Key has now slipped below the water’s surface, a disappearing act likely to be repeated elsewhere in these waters as pounding waves breach dying reefs. Scientists predict that the Keys ultimately will have to be surrounded by sea walls as ocean levels rise.

With a gentle kick of his fins through murky green water, Lapointe maneuvered around a coral mound that resembled the intricate, folded pattern of a brain. Except that this brain was being eroded by the coralline equivalent of flesh-eating disease.

“It rips my heart out,” Lapointe said. “It’s like coming home and seeing burglars have ransacked your house, and everything you cherished is gone.”

The ancient seas contained large areas with little or no oxygen — anoxic and hypoxic zones that could never have supported sea life as we know it. It was a time when bacteria and jellyfish ruled.

Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, has spent most of her career peering into waters that resemble those of the distant past.

On research dives off the Louisiana coast, she has seen cottony white bacteria coating the seafloor. The sulfurous smell of rotten eggs, from a gas produced by the microbes, has seeped into her mask. The bottom is littered with the ghostly silhouettes of dead crabs, sea stars and other animals.

The cause of death is decaying algae. Fed by millions of tons of fertilizer, human and animal waste, and other farm runoff racing down the Mississippi River, tiny marine plants run riot, die and drift to the bottom. Bacteria then take over. In the process of breaking down the plant matter, they suck the oxygen out of seawater, leaving little or none for fish or other marine life.

Years ago, Rabalais popularized a term for this broad area off the Louisiana coast: the “dead zone.” In fact, dead zones aren’t really dead. They are teeming with life — most of it bacteria and other ancient creatures that evolved in an ocean without oxygen and that need little to survive.

“There are tons and tons of bacteria that live in dead zones,” Rabalais said. “You see this white snot-looking stuff all over the bottom.”

Other primitive life thrives too. A few worms do well, and jellyfish feast on the banquet of algae and microbes.

The dead zone off Louisiana, the second largest after one in the Baltic Sea, is a testament to the unintended consequences of manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer on a giant scale to support American agriculture. The runoff from Midwestern farms is part of a slurry of wastewater that flows down the Mississippi, which drains 40% of the continental United States.

The same forces at work in the mouth of the Mississippi have helped create 150 dead zones around the world, including parts of the Chesapeake Bay and waters off the Oregon and Washington coasts.

About half of the Earth’s landscape has been altered by deforestation, farming and development, which has increased the volume of runoff and nutrient-rich sediment.

Most of the planet’s salt marshes and mangrove forests, which serve as a filter between land and sea, have vanished with coastal development. Half of the world’s population lives in coastal regions, which add an average of 2,000 homes each day.

Global warming adds to the stress. A reduced snowpack from higher temperatures is accelerating river discharges and thus plankton blooms. The oceans have warmed slightly — 1 degree on average in the last century. Warmer waters speed microbial growth.

Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has been tracking the spread of low-oxygen zones. He has determined that the number is nearly doubling every decade, fed by a worldwide cascade of nutrients — or as he puts it, energy. We stoke the ocean with energy streaming off the land, he said, and with no clear pathways up the food chain, this energy fuels an explosion of microbial growth.

These microbes have been barely noticeable for millions of years, tucked away like the pilot light on a gas stove.

“Now,” Diaz said, “the stove has been turned on.”

In Australia, fishermen noticed the fireweed around the time much of Moreton Bay started turning a dirty, tea-water brown after every rain. The wild growth smothered the bay’s northern sea-grass beds, once full of fish and shellfish, under a blanket a yard thick.

The older, bottom layers of weed turned grayish-white and started to decay. Bacteria, feeding on the rot, sucked all of the oxygen from beneath this woolly layer at night. Most sea life swam or scuttled away; some suffocated. Fishermen’s catches plummeted.

Most disturbing were the rashes, an outbreak often met with scoffs from local authorities.

After suffering painful skin lesions, fisherman Greg Savige took a sealed bag of the weed in 2000 to Barry Carbon, then director-general of the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency. He warned Carbon to be careful with it, as it was “toxic stuff.” Carbon replied that he knew all about cyanobacteria from western Australian waters and that there was nothing to worry about.

Then he opened the bag and held it close to his face for a sniff.

“It was like smearing hot mustard on the lips,” the chastened official recalled.

Aboriginal fishermen had spotted the weed in small patches years earlier, but it had moved into new parts of the bay and was growing like never before.

Each spring, Lyngbya bursts forth from spores on the seafloor and spreads in dark green-and-black dreadlocks. It flourishes for months before retreating into the muck. Scientists say it produces more than 100 toxins, probably as a defense mechanism.

At its peak in summer, the weed now covers as much as 30 square miles of Moreton Bay, an estuary roughly the size of San Francisco Bay. In one seven-week period, its expansion was measured at about 100 square meters a minute — a football field in an hour.

William Dennison, then director of the University of Queensland botany lab, couldn’t believe it at first.

“We checked this 20 times. It was mind-boggling. It was like ‘The Blob,’ ” Dennison said, recalling the 1950s horror movie about an alien life form that consumed everything in its path.

Suspecting that nutrients from partially treated sewage might be the culprit, another Queensland University scientist, Peter Bell, collected some wastewater and put it in a beaker with a pinch of Lyngbya. The weed bloomed happily.

As Brisbane and the surrounding area became the fastest growing region in Australia, millions of gallons of partially treated sewage gushed from 30 wastewater treatment plants into the bay and its tributary rivers.

Officials upgraded the sewage plants to remove nitrogen from the wastewater, but it did not stop the growth of the infernal weed.

Researchers began looking for other sources of Lyngbya’s nutrients, and are now investigating whether iron and possibly phosphorous are being freed from soil as forests of eucalyptus and other native trees are cleared for farming and development.

“We know the human factor is responsible. We just have to figure out what it is,” Dennison said.

Recently, Lyngbya has appeared up the coast from Moreton Bay, on the Great Barrier Reef, where helicopters bring tourists to a heart-shaped coral outcropping. When the helicopters depart, seabirds roost on the landing platform, fertilizing the reef with their droppings. Lyngbya now beards the surrounding corals.

“Lyngbya has lots of tricks,” said scientist Judith O’Neil. “That’s why it’s been around for 3 billion years.”

It can pull nitrogen out of the air and make its own fertilizer. It uses a different spectrum of sunlight than algae do, so it can thrive even in murky waters. Perhaps its most diabolical trick is its ability to feed on itself. When it dies and decays, it releases its own nitrogen and phosphorous into the water, spurring another generation of growth.

“Once it gets going, it’s able to sustain itself,” O’Neil said.

Ron Johnstone, a University of Queensland researcher, recently experienced Lyngbya’s fire. He was studying whether iron and phosphorous in bay sediments contribute to the blooms, and he accidentally came in contact with bits of the weed. He broke out in rashes and boils, and needed a cortisone shot to ease the inflammation.

“It covered my whole chest and neck,” he said. “We’ve just ordered complete containment suits so we can roll in it.”

Fishermen say they cannot afford such pricey equipment. Nor would it be practical. For some, the only solution is to turn away from the sea.

Lifelong fisherman Mike Tanner, 50, stays off the water at least four months each year to avoid contact with the weed. It’s an agreement he struck with his wife, who was appalled by his blisters and worried about the long-term health consequences.

“When he came home with rash all over his body,” Sandra Tanner said, “I said, ‘No, you are not going.’ We didn’t know what was happening to him.”

Tanner, a burly, bearded man, is frustrated that he cannot help provide for his family. Gloves and other waterproof gear failed to protect him.

“It’s like acid,” Tanner said. “I couldn’t believe it. It kept pulling the skin off.”

Before the Lyngbya outbreak, 40 commercial shrimp trawlers and crab boats worked these waters. Now there are six, and several of them sit idle during fireweed blooms.

“It’s the only thing that can beat us,” Greg Savige said. “Wind is nothing. Waves, nothing. It’s the only thing that can make us stop work. When you’ve got sores and the skin peels away, what are you going to do?”

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Distress signals

* 97% of elkhorn and staghorn coral off Florida’s coast have disappeared since 1975.

* 90% of worldwide stocks of tuna, cod and other big fish have disappeared in the last 50 years.

* 650 gray whales have washed up sick or dead along the West Coast in the last seven years.

* 150 oxygen-depleted ‘dead zones’ have been identified in oceans around the world.

* 75% of kelp forests off the Southern California coast, prime habitat for fish, have vanished in the last 50 years.

Sources: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Nature; Virginia Institute of Marine Science; California Department of Fish and Game.

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The birth of a ‘dead zone’

Coastal waters can go into toxic shock from an overdose of basic nutrients that cause algae to grow explosively, making the water inhospitable for nearly all sea life except bacteria and jellyfish.

* Nutrient-rich runoff: Fresh water laced with nitrogen and other nutrients from farms, animal feedlots, sewage pipes, smokestacks and auto tailpipes flows into the ocean.

* Thermal zones: The plume of nutrient-rich water enters a warm surface layer over denser, colder saltwater. The layers don’t mix, inhibiting the flow of oxygen.

* Algae blooms: Nutrients fuel blooms of microscropic plants, or algae, which turn coastal waters soupy green.

* Organic rain: As the algae die, the mass of cells and other detritus sink to the seafloor. Bacteria break down this organic matter, consuming most of the oxygen in the water.

* Flee or die: Without enough oxygen, sea stars, corals, snails and other shellfish suffocate. Fish and shrimp swim or scuttle away, if they can.

Sources: Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Council for Science and the Environment, Science Museum of Minnesota. Graphics reporting by Cheryl Brownstein-Santiago.

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Slow suffocation

Low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ are spreading as fertilizer use and deforestation grow, and coastal populations boom.

The number of ‘dead zones’ is nearly doubling every decade.

1950s: 3

1960s: 10

1970s :19

1980s: 37

1990s: 68

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Ancient bacteria with a bite

Lyngbya majuscula, a strain of cyanobacteria, frequently blankets Moreton Bay, Australia, and other subtropical waters, vexing wildlife and fishermen.

Lifecycle

* Spores in sediment sprout tufts, eventually covering the seafloor.

* Photosynthesis produces bubbles of oxygen that lift the bacteria to the surface. Thick mats clog boat motors and foul beaches.

* Decaying Lyngbya sinks to the bottom, scattering spores anew.

Hazards

* It emits toxins that are harmful to sea life and humans. It can cause rashes on contact, as well as respiratory distress, nausea and dizziness.

* Lyngbya smothers prime fishing grounds, blocking sunlight to sea grasses, driving away other sea life and robbing fishermen of their catch.

Why It’s Unique

* It spreads rapidly, about 100 square meters a minute.

* It makes its own food, stripping nitrogen out of the air to spur growth. Lyngbya can also feed on itself, using nitrogen released into the seawater as earlier growth dies and decays.

–

Sources: University of Queensland, University of Maryland, University of South Florida, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, University of British Columbia, Moreton Bay Waterways and Catchments Partnership. Graphics reporting by Cheryl Brownstein-Santiago, Tom Lauder.

FRANKFURT, July 28 — Wal-Mart Stores, admitting defeat in Germany’s giant, cutthroat retail market, said today that it would sell its 85 stores here to a German retailer, the Metro Group, and incur a loss of $1 billion.

The decision to sell out came two months after Wal-Mart sold its stores in South Korea, and amounts to a rare retreat by the world’s largest retailer from its breakneck global expansion.

In Germany, analysts say, Wal-Mart never got traction in a market that is characterized by unrelenting price competition, well-established discounters, and the cultural resistance of German shoppers to hypermarkets, which sell fresh vegetables a few aisles away from lawn mowers.

“They walked into a triple-witching hour in Germany,” said James Bacos, the director of the retail and consumer goods practice at Mercer Management Consulting in Munich. “They got into Germany at a time when the whole market was shifting away from their model.”

Wal-Mart does not break down its results by country, but analysts estimate that it has lost money for most of the 8½ years it has operated here, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Wal-Mart and Metro did not disclose the terms of the sale, but Wal-Mart said it would record a pretax charge of about $1 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2007 to write off its German investment.

“We put a good effort into the country,” a spokeswoman, Beth Keck, said. “But as we looked at our competitive environment here, we realized it was going to be hard to achieve the results we expect.”

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., made a similar calculation in South Korea, selling 16 stores to a local retailer, Shinsegae, for $882 million. As in Germany, Wal-Mart did not appeal sufficiently to local Korean tastes, and struggled to compete with aggressive discounters.

Despite these setbacks, Ms. Keck said, Wal-Mart continues to thrive in many countries outside the United States, with particularly robust results in Mexico, Canada, Brazil, and Britain. Wal-Mart had international net sales of $7.6 billion in June, a 29.5 percent increase over the same month in 2005, though nearly two-thirds of that gain came from acquisitions.

Metro, one of Germany’s largest retail conglomerates, said it planned to fold the 85 stores into its Real chain, which is bigger than Wal-Mart here but is also ailing. Wal-Mart’s German stores employ 11,000 people and generate 2 billion euros ($2.5 billion) a year in sales, according to Metro.

By adding those 85 stores to Real’s 550 supermarkets and hypermarkets, Metro said it could fortify its purchasing power in what is the world’s third-largest retail market. The company said it was committed to hypermarkets.

Some of Wal-Mart’s troubles stem from the way it broke into the German market in 1998, according to analysts. Instead of starting from scratch, it bought two second-tier retailers, Wertkauf and Interspar, and found itself with a hodgepodge of stores, geographically dispersed and often in poor locations.

The company initially installed American managers, who made some well-intentioned cultural gaffes, like offering to bag groceries for customers (Germans prefer to bag their own groceries) or instructing clerks to smile (Germans, used to brusque service, were put off).

Wal-Mart later went tried German managers, and then appointed David Wild, a former executive at Tesco of Britain, to run its German operations. He tried to win over customers by selling organic meat and produce.

“They found they had some things to learn about the German market, and they did change, but maybe too late,” Mr. Bacos said.

Other problems, however, were largely outside Wal-Mart’s control. Two German discounters, Aldi and Lidl, dominate the grocery business here, with smaller shops that feature low-priced food of good quality. Aldi also heavily promotes one-week sales, featuring deeply discounted merchandise ranging from wine to garden hoses, which draw customers back again and again.

While Wal-Mart’s vast size gives it enormous leverage in purchasing clothing and other manufactured goods around the world, it must buy much of the food for its German stores locally. And in Germany, it has less muscle than Aldi, which has 4,100 shops and a presence in nearly every town in the country.

“Germany is the home of the discounter,” said Mark Josefson, a retail analyst at Kepler Securities in Frankfurt. “Wal-Mart is not competing on price, and that is one of its main attributes in its home market.”

Beyond these competitive pressures, there is the reality of the German consumer — one of the most parsimonious and price-conscious in Europe. While consumer confidence has picked up recently, Mr. Bacos said the proportion of household income that Germans spend on retail purchases continues to decline. Profit margins in German retailing are the lowest in Europe.

“Wal-Mart has tried, for the better part of a decade, to adapt to this market,” he said. “I think they’ve looked at the situation and come to the conclusion, ‘How long is it going to take?’ ”

By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer

(07-25) 11:45 PDT PARIS, France (AP) –

Eric Creuly’s bedroom is a khaki tent on the banks of a Paris canal. His kitchen is a barbecue made from a metal barrel, and his living room is a set of mismatched chairs where he and friends smoke and watch the pleasure boats pass.

Tent camps have become a familiar sight in Paris since the aid group Doctors of the World, or Medecins du Monde, first distributed tents in December to shelter the homeless and make their plight less invisible.

But complaints about the tents have been pouring into City Hall, and four tents were burned this weekend in circumstances that are still unclear. With Paris sweltering in a heat wave, authorities say the tents are unsanitary and dangerous.

Socialist City Hall wants many of them moved, and the conservative government wants them just plain gone. Last week, the government named a mediator to find a solution.

About 300 tents with the aid group’s insignia still dot Paris — and they are even harder to overlook in July, when tourists fill the streets and Parisians live outdoors. Now, some homeless are even saving money to buy tents themselves.

Doctors of the World says it will take down one tent for every permanent housing option provided by the government. It acknowledges the risks of tents — that heat-struck homeless could die hidden from view, for example — but adds that street life is dangerous, no matter what.

“We never said that tents were the solution,” said Graciela Robert, who heads the homeless mission for the aid group. “But a tent is better than the sidewalk.”

The tents have popped up under bridges on the Seine River, near the stretch of quay where City Hall sets up a sandy beach every summer. They appeared on chic avenues and on the Canal Saint-Martin, a trendy area for nightlife.

Creuly, a 48-year-old construction worker who became homeless after losing his job a year ago, has spent a few weeks living in his girlfriend’s Doctors of the World tent. It’s better than going to a shelter, he says: He isn’t kicked out during the day and doesn’t have to worry about his belongings being stolen.

He and his friends — some of whom go by nicknames like “Momo the Cat” and “The Indian” — watch out for each other and take turns guarding their row of tents. Tuesday morning, they drank cold coffee and shared croissants under a parasol from an abandoned ice cream cart.

“We’re at home here, we do as we like,” Creuly said. He added, however, that he doesn’t believe the tents will push the government to help the homeless.

France, with a population of nearly 63 million, has about 86,500 homeless people, according to a landmark 2001 study by the INSEE statistics agency. The Abbe Pierre Foundation, which works with the homeless, said this year that the figure is closer to 150,000.

The government fears the tents give people a reason to stay on the streets, expose them to sanitation problems and encourage them to live in groups — a problem because it is harder to persuade them to get help.

“The government’s objective in this affair is simple: no more tents,” said Benoist Apparu, communications official for the Ministry of Social Cohesion. “Not because we don’t like tents, but because the problem with them is that we have enough trouble as it is getting people off the street, persuading them to move to a shelter or a rehabilitation center.”

The Abbe Pierre Foundation shares some of those concerns. Patrick Doutreligne, an official with the Roman Catholic-affiliated charity, said there are as many negative effects as positive ones.

City officials say they don’t disapprove of the tent initiative but want mediators to persuade homeless to move their tents away from apartment buildings, for example.

On Monday, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe sent a letter to the government pressing for 5,000 more homeless lodgings in the Paris region — not just overnight shelters.

Creuly and his friends have dreams of their own. Perched on the edge of the canal, talking about life, they have fantasies about being granted an abandoned building to fix up themselves.

“I realize they can’t just come up with 1,000 new lodgings, just like that,” Creuly said. “But are we supposed to believe anyone is really trying? I’m tired of all this talk.”

___

Associated Press Writer Nick Vinocur in Paris contributed to this report.

This story ran on nwitimes.com on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 12:12 PM CDT

CHICAGO — Wine connoisseurs soon will be able to head home from restaurants with an unfinished bottle of their favorite vintage.

A new state law signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Monday lets restaurant-goers recork and take home leftover wine as long as it is wrapped in a tamperproof bag.

Officials hope it will discourage diners from chugging that last glass of wine, then getting behind the wheel.

Some wine drinkers criticized the measure, though, saying it still might promote driving under the influence.

“Whether it’s corked or not, I am totally against it,” Michelle LeMothe, 46, of Lincoln, said while sipping a glass of chardonnay at a seafood restaurant in downtown Chicago. “I’m in the car with my kids (often) and I don’t want it out there.”

The change takes effect Jan. 1.

Illinois law currently bars people from having open liquor containers in vehicles. But the new law lets them drive with bottles that have been sealed in the specialty bags. That way, if police stop the driver, they’ll be able to see whether the wine has been illegally reopened.

Supporters say people should be able to take home wine just like any other leftover.

“At first blush, it can strike one as a frivolous piece of legislation, but it serves a couple of legitimate purposes,” said Rep. John Fritchey, a Chicago Democrat and the law’s House sponsor.

Restaurants might do more wine business because diners will be more likely to order a bottle — especially an expensive bottle — if they know it won’t go to waste, he said, and road-safety advocates hope people won’t feel obligated to finish off the bottle before going home.

“The legislation is unique because it’s one of those rare bills that is simultaneously pro-business and pro-consumer,” Fritchey said.

Miriam Matasar, manager of Bin 36 in Chicago’s trendy River North neighborhood, said she hopes the new law encourages patrons to try different types of wine. Her restaurant has a 17-page list that offers roughly 50 different wines by the glass and up to 200 by the bottle.

“It’s a great way to play up the bottle list because then people don’t have to feel like they have to drink a whole bottle of wine. They can take it home and enjoy it,” Matasar said.

Most other states already have laws allowing drivers to have opened bottles under certain conditions. Illinois joins 16 other states in requiring the use of special bags for the wine, according to the Web site of a company that makes the bags.

Carrie Young of Chicago washed down her fish tacos with a glass of pinot noir at the downtown seafood restaurant Monday evening. She said the law won’t change her dining habits dramatically.

“You usually go out after dinner and who wants to carry a bottle around?” she said. “And rarely ever do I have any wine leftover, anyway.”

Unfortunately, they’re beneath 300 feet of water outside the Golden Gate

Glen Martin, Chronicle Environment Writer

Thursday, July 20, 2006

San Francisco long has been renowned for its hills, bay and bridges - but not for expanses of sand dunes. That’s liable to change.

It turns out there are more than 2 square miles of dunes right next to the city, and world-class dunes at that: Only a few sites around the globe have larger dunes of this sort.

Access, however, will remain difficult unless you’re a sand dab or Dungeness crab. The dunes are just west of the Golden Gate, submerged in 100 to 350 feet of sea water.

What you are looking at: Sediments, carried out the Golden Gate by powerful tides, have created some of the largest underwater sand dunes on the planet. U.S. Geological Survey scientists used powerful sonar equipment to measure the ocean bottom and mapped the dunes in different colors to emphasize their shape. Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

Here is a digital rendering of sand waves in the bay — when under water they’re not called dunes. Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

Here is a digital rendering of sand waves beneath the surface of San Francisco Bay. Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

Scientists grasped the extent and size of the underwater dunes - technically known as “sand waves” - only recently, aided by sophisticated, multiple-beam sonar that provides stunningly detailed images of the submarine topography.

“These are some of the largest sand waves in the world,” said Patrick Barnard, a coastal geologist with the Santa Cruz office of the U.S. Geological Survey. “They’re certainly in the upper 10 percent.”

The sand waves range up to 700 feet long and reach heights of more than 30 feet, Barnard said. It is a dynamic system, he said, with the configuration of the individual dunes changing significantly with each tidal cycle. But overall and over time, the net change to the entire field is slight.

“From 2004 to 2005, the field only moved 7 meters (about 23 feet),” Barnard said.

Dan Hanes, a USGS oceanographer, said researchers first mapped the sand waves while doing water-depth studies in and around the bay with advanced sonar devices in 2004 and 2005.

“We knew they were there, but we didn’t know their extent or how large they were,” Hanes said. “Our work gave us the first 3-D map of the area.”

Hanes said he and Barnard were surprised by size of the sand waves “and also by the pattern. Frankly, it was beautiful.”

Barnard and Hanes posted their study of San Francisco’s sand waves this week on a restricted Web site run by the American Geophysical Union.

Gary Greene, a professor emeritus in geology at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory and a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Marine Research Institute, said he wasn’t necessarily surprised at the size of the dunes, given San Francisco Bay’s robust tidal dynamics.

“We know some of the sand waves off the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound reach heights of 90 feet, but that system up there moves such a tremendous amount of water,” Greene said. “What I find especially significant (about the USGS study) is its predicting of the tidal currents off the Golden Gate, and the way they affect” the sand waves’ shape.

Hanes said scientific interest in sand waves has been growing around the world because sonar technology has improved to the point that high resolution, three-dimensional maps can now be made of the ocean’s floor. Sand waves are important components of traveling marine sediment and can help researches understand processes involved in beach erosion.

San Francisco’s sand waves may have some peers in length and height, but they could be unique in one respect: the size of the water system that created them.

Most extensive sand wave fields, explained Barnard, occur in large inlets, such as Puget Sound, the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada or Cook Inlet in Alaska. These huge waterways have tremendous tidal ranges that move great amounts of water and sediment over vast areas, allowing underwater dunes to form.

In comparison, the San Francisco Bay system is relatively small, and its tidal range is narrow. But its geology nevertheless permits the deposition of big sand waves.

“In San Francisco, you have a large bay funneling through a very small opening that is constricted by rocky headlands,” Barnard said.

That flow is powerful. About 500 billion gallons — or enough water to fill 660,000 Olympic-size swimming pools — move through the mile-wide Golden Gate over each six-hour period, Barnard said.

Squeezing so much water through such a narrow opening creates extremely strong currents.

“The Golden Gate has one of the strongest tidal currents in the world, averaging about 5.6 miles an hour,” Barnard said. “Water moving at that speed can move a great deal of sediment.”

Plus, there is — or at least, has been — a lot of sediment to move in the San Francisco Bay system. The drainages of the Sacramento River, the San Joaquin River and Alameda Creek historically contributed huge volumes of gravel and sand to the estuary.

The sediment loads of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers increased significantly after the Gold Rush, Barnard said. A major concomitant of the hydraulic mining that ravaged the Sierra was the reduction of entire mountainsides into sand and gravel, which were then sluiced downstream into the bay and out the Golden Gate.

Human activity may therefore have augmented San Francisco’s sand wave field. But an opposite process could now be at work, he said.

“Part of the purpose of our (sand wave) survey was to assess changes in San Francisco Bay in the last 50 years,” Barnard said. “We’ve found the bay has lost a huge amount of sediment since 1956 — approximately 137 million cubic yards.”

A variety of factors could be contributing to the reduced sediment loads. Among them, the stabilization of the watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and the reduction of tidal current due to development in the bay.

“We also know that dredging has removed a lot of sediment - about 50 million cubic yards,” Barnard said.

Greene said dams on the Central Valley’s big rivers have impeded sediment flow, and “the great slug of sediment from the Gold Rush has worked its way through the bay. There’s just less available now.”

That reduced sediment supply could ultimately affect the size and configuration of the sand waves. Other consequences also are likely.

“Less available sediment affects all the local coastal processes,” Barnard said, “including Ocean Beach. We know Ocean Beach has been experiencing accelerated erosion, and it increasingly appears linked to reduced sediment transport from the bay.”

By Jean Guccione, Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2006

Some public transit advocates are seeing red about rose.

That’s the color that City Councilman Bernard C. Parks wants to use on maps to trace the route of a light rail line being built west from downtown.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has suggested calling the light rail along Exposition Boulevard the Aqua Line, and using that color to mark its path. It already uses aqua on planning maps, and transit buffs seem to like it.

Parks has further riled some in the transit world by ignoring the MTA’s long-standing practice of designating rail lines by colors — Red, Blue, Green and Gold. He wants the route called the Expo Line.

The hue and cry, which began in March, has reached such proportions that some MTA board members would not talk about it.

The MTA board is set to pick a color for the line as early as next week.

“I’m looking forward to this color controversy being put behind us so we can focus on the construction and funding of the entire line to Santa Monica,” said Ken Alpern, president of the Transit Coalition and a Mar Vista Neighborhood Council member.

For four years, MTA staff has drawn an aqua line on maps to indicate the first phase of construction, an 8.5-mile railway between downtown Los Angeles and Culver City commonly referred to as the Exposition Line.

During that time, the MTA has received more than 2,000 comments on the proposed rail line, mostly about safety, sound barriers and landscaping.

“We never had any comments on color designation whatsoever,” said Maya Emsden, the agency’s deputy executive officer for creative services.

Aqua fit the MTA’s map color criteria. “It has to be bright, legible and easy to pronounce,” Emsden said.

Advocates say they like the way it echoes the hues of several landmarks along the proposed route, including a band painted around the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the Los Angeles Convention Center, Al-Khattab Mosque, Ballona Creek and Dorsey High School.

Not to mention the train’s proposed final destination: the ocean.

But Parks, whose City Council district will be bisected by the new rail line, doesn’t like the Aqua Line, or another MTA suggestion: the Purple Line. Nor, for that matter, does he like the selection process — which failed to ask residents for their color choices.

So, what’s wrong with aqua or purple?

“Those are colors that don’t resonate,” Parks explained.

He also said the MTA doesn’t listen to his constituents in South Los Angeles as much as it does to those on the line’s proposed Westside end.

“It seems to me that the folks who supported aqua seemed more affiliated with Phase II, not Phase I,” Parks conceded.

Construction has begun on the first phase of the light rail line.

A second phase of construction, from Culver City to Santa Monica, is on the drawing board.

In recent months, Parks said, he has sought the opinions of his constituents and four other members of the Los Angeles City Council, which he said will contribute $40 million to the first phase of the $640-million transit project.

“We just asked people to give us some ideas of colors,” Parks said. Their suggestions could fill a paint store: amber, aqua, copper, olive, plum, rose, sienna, gray, lemon, lime, pink, purple, salmon, sky, tan, teal and violet.

Rose represents Exposition Park’s rose garden, the city councilman said. It was his second choice.

Parks and others decided his first recommendation — gray — was too similar to the San Gabriel Valley’s new Silver Streak, a rapid 40-mile bus line from Claremont to downtown Los Angeles.

Alpern, who lives in Sherman Oaks, took issue with Parks’ characterization that Westside residents were dominating the debate. “Regrettably, Bernard Parks is being an army of one on this issue,” he said, noting that the color aqua has widespread support from people living all along the proposed rail line.

The Friends 4 Expo Steering Committee and the Mar Vista Community Council Board of Directors endorsed the color aqua.

Darrell Clarke, co-chairman of Friends 4 Expo, offered several reasons for rejecting Parks’ color choice, including that it had not been vetted by the public.

The color rose also “is most identified with Pasadena — the Rose Bowl and Rose Parade — on the other side of town,” Clarke, who lives in Santa Monica, wrote in an e-mail to members of his group.

The crack is 8m-wide in places

The largest tear in the Earth’s crust seen in decades, if not centuries, could carve out a new ocean in Africa, according to satellite data.

Geologists say a crack that opened up last year may eventually reach the Red Sea, isolating much of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa.

The 60km-long rift was initially sparked by an earthquake in September.

Follow-up observations reported in the journal Nature suggest the split is growing at an unprecedented rate.

We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form Dr Tim Wright, University of Oxford

It betrays events deep beneath the ground, where some of the tectonic plates that form Africa are gradually moving apart from the Arabian plate, causing the crust to stretch and thin.

As rifts appear, molten rock bubbles up from beneath the surface, hardening to form a new strip of ocean floor.

Dr Tim Wright from the University of Oxford, UK, said if the ripping of the crust continued, the horn of Africa would eventually split off from the rest of the continent, in about a million years.

“We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form,” he told the BBC News website. “It will connect to the Red Sea and the ocean will flow in.”

Fundamental processes

Dr Wright is a member of a team from the UK and Ethiopia that has been monitoring the creation of the new ocean basin; a rare event on dry land.

They used sensitive seismic instruments, field measurements and satellite images from the European Space Agency’s Envisat spacecraft to study what is happening beneath the ground.

“We’ve been able to work up all the satellite data and get a very precise map,” said Dr Wright.

“It’s the biggest rifting episode at least since the 1970s and possibly in hundreds of years.

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to use satellite images to investigate the fundamental processes behind rifting.”

The shift in the Earth’s plates has been happening gradually over the course of two million years but every now and again earthquakes and volcanic eruptions herald sudden break-ups.

Space techniques

One such event took place in September last year, opening up a 60km-long (37 mile) stretch of a fault-line that runs from Ethiopia to the southern edge of the Red Sea.

An international team is monitoring two million years of rock history

“It’s amazing,” said Cindy Ebinger, from Royal Holloway, University of London.

“It’s the first large event we have seen like this in a rift zone since the advent of some of the space-based techniques we’re now using.

“These techniques give us a resolution and a detail to see what’s really going on and how the Earth processes work.”

Scientists have calculated that 2.5 cubic km (0.6 cubic mile) of magma has flowed up through the crack in the Earth’s crust.

It is enough to fill London’s Wembley stadium 2,000 times or smother the area within the capital’s M25 orbital motorway with molten rock to a depth of 1m (1 yard).

Lori Waselchuk for The New York Times

French Quarter-style homes are being built on a pedestrians-only street in River Ranch, a planned community in Lafayette, La.

LAFAYETTE, La. — New Orleans is supposed to be 130 miles east of this Cajun country capital on the Vermillion River, but there in the distance, rising from the swampland, is something that looks very familiar.

Lori Waselchuk for The New York Times

Donna LeBlanc and her mother, Hortense Reine, view the project differently. Mrs. Reine likes it, but Ms. LeBlanc disapproves of its being “a complete imitation.”

Lori Waselchuk for The New York Times

In River Ranch, a gate, left, and an iron balustrade, right, are intended to re-create details from New Orleans.

The quaint row houses of the French Quarter are off Interstate 10, past the strip malls. There are Garden District-style mansions in a neighborhood named the Garden District, and blocks full of Creole cottages, lush courtyards and lacy ironwork. There is even a street called Elysian Fields.

It is not the Crescent City, however, but rather River Ranch, a commercial development here that is a virtual re-creation of much of historic residential New Orleans, meticulous in detail and substantial in size, with a growing population of more than a thousand on about 300 acres.

The project was started about 10 years ago but now is attracting the attention of New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina who long to have a wrought-iron balcony or two in their lives again.

“I looked at it and thought, ‘This is quite nice!’ ” said Hortense Reine, a New Orleans evacuee who is staying in Lafayette and wants to buy a River Ranch apartment. “I think it’s very interesting what they’ve done and that imitation is a form of flattery.”

Many former residents like the project so much that they believe its mirror-image designs should be used to rebuild the ruined neighborhoods of New Orleans, an idea that some state officials have embraced. David Terrie, a New Orleans native who has taken solace on the slightly familiar streets of the planned community, considers it an enthusiastic tribute to his lost home.

“River Ranch blows my mind,” Mr. Terrie said. “When I first saw it, I called everyone in my family and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ Why couldn’t they do something like that in New Orleans?”

But for all its charm and easy livability, River Ranch has disturbed others who quarrel with its architectural style. They see it as the design equivalent of cubic zirconium, the epitome of what many in New Orleans hope the rebuilt city will never be: an imitation New Orleans, a pretty postcard version of a real city.

“It’s hard to describe my gut reaction to that place — it’s disgust,” said Donna LeBlanc, a native New Orleanian who lives in Lafayette just a few minutes from River Ranch. Ms. LeBlanc firmly disagrees with her mother, Mrs. Reine, who has been staying with her. “If someone gave me a house in River Ranch, I’d sell it and go live someplace else. I’ve never been anywhere that tried to be such a complete imitation of something else.”

Carefully planned communities like River Ranch stand at the crossroads of the debate over what should replace the flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans and damaged Gulf Coast towns. The development is a model of a design philosophy known as New Urbanism, which stresses densely packed housing, green town squares, easy access to transportation, and architecture with a historical theme.

New Urbanism, which began in the 1990’s, has been popular in the last year among smaller Gulf Coast towns, but it has yet to gain traction among New Orleans residents and planners, many of whom say the old urbanism worked just fine.

The resistance focuses not so much on planning principles that favor density and green space as on the traditional styles that New Urbanists seem wedded to.

“We don’t need a facsimile of ourselves,” said David Waggonner, of Waggonner & Ball, a New Orleans architecture firm that has been active in post-hurricane planning. “There were some good ideas in old New Orleans. There are ideas worth studying, and we should learn from them, but it’s not my nature to think it’s natural to copy.”

Critics also say that New Urbanist designs tend to be too rigid for contemporary times and that they cater to developers and rich homeowners. In River Ranch, prices start around $265,000 and run into the millions.

Still, a civic group in the flooded Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, near Lake Pontchartrain, invited a group of New Urbanist planners to the city a few months ago to help sketch designs for a rebuilt neighborhood.

Residents are awaiting the group’s final recommendations, which in draft form focus on things like making Gentilly more compact and pedestrian-friendly. Developed in the early to mid-1900’s with bungalows and wide streets, Gentilly was the early suburban answer to old New Orleans. The neighborhood, devastated by flooding after the storm, still resembles a ghost town.

“Some things the residents will embrace, and some other things, well, I’m waiting to see,” said Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, a city councilwoman who represents Gentilly.

Ms. Hedge-Morrell said some early proposals “didn’t fit the feel” of the area.

“For instance,” she said, “they talked about making it possible to walk everywhere. Having lived in Gentilly, I don’t know if people really want to walk everywhere.”

In the days after the storm, Bring New Orleans Back, a commission set up by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, resisted the New Urbanist ideas. But the Louisiana Recovery Authority, a state agency guiding the rebuilding, embraced the ideas and hired the lead architect for River Ranch, Steven Oubre, to be part of a team of planners who created a regional vision for the state. The plans were submitted recently.

Mr. Oubre said that momentum was building beyond Gentilly and that his firm, Architects Southwest, and other New Urbanist planners had submitted other proposals.

If the people of New Orleans were introduced to the concepts, he said, “I think overwhelmingly the population would support this.”

“There is a sense among the design community that New Urbanism is nothing but a throwback to the past and isn’t warranted,” he added. “I don’t agree with that.”

Many former New Orleanians said they were drawn to River Ranch out of sentimentality and a longing for a New Orleans in which urban problems had been erased.

“We started to worry about the crime in New Orleans years ago, then we found this and fell in love with it because it reminded us of Uptown,” said Colin Riggs, a River Ranch boutique owner who used to live in New Orleans. “It has the pretty balconies and shops and restaurants and all.”

Given the difficulties the city is facing, Ms. Riggs added, “I think this is better than the real thing; I think of it as copying the good old days, and that’s a good thing.”

There are a lot of rules in River Ranch: The shutters must be functional. Ceiling heights are to be 10 feet on the ground floor, nothing less. Bricks must be old.

The bricks for Karen Daigle’s Garden District home in River Ranch came from an old peanut factory in Virginia. Ms. Daigle has been in River Ranch since its beginning and is now the marketing director. Touches like antique brick give the area charm and character, she said, but it is still not the same as the original.

“That was the feel of New Orleans and hopefully it will be again,” Ms. Daigle said. “We’re not ready to give up on New Orleans. It makes me want to cry every time I think about it.”

Ms. LeBlanc is sad, too, but for different reasons. River Ranch makes her think about New Orleans, she said, and “I think I’d rather have my memories.”