Word: bacteria
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...pressures. The unsightly and smelly layer, more than 100 feet deep in some areas, is chasing tourists away from Mayan towns in the area and posing huge cleanup expenses to a government already strapped for cash. Worse, the results of a University of California, Davis, analysis found that the bacteria is toxic. Scientists are urging residents to avoid cooking with, bathing in or drinking the water. Several towns get drinking water from the lake. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Politics of Water...
...problem is as much visual as it is olfactory. As the bacteria dies, a foul odor wafts from the water. "It's like trying to eat lunch in an outhouse," says English backpacker Brian Thompson, 22, pulling his t-shirt over his nose between bites of chicken at a little lakeside restaurant. "Tell you one thing, I wouldn't eat the fish." One restaurant owner says he's considering closing or renting the space to another operator, at a loss. "We used to have 15 or 20 tables a day. Now we get one," says Pedro Chavajag, 38, owner...
...tourists if they could offer freshly caught lake fish on their menus. Over the years, however, the bass ate through nearly the entire food chain, including the the young of the rare Pato Poc duck. Their consumption disrupted the ecosystem and destroyed the organisms that would have kept the bacteria...
Without natural predators, the bacteria needed only a source of food to thrive. That would be phosphorous, which is abundant among the hills and three towering volcanoes around Atitlan. The situation is aggravated by government distribution of chemical fertilizer containing extra phosphorous to poor farmers who liberally apply it to their fields. Widespread deforestation allows the soil to leach into the lake during Guatemala's six-month-long rainy season. (See more about Guatemala...
Even indigenous Mayans' unknowingly feed the bacteria by washing their clothes on lakeshore rocks with soap that contains phosphorous. An overabundance of phosphorous coupled with three weeks of unusually high temperatures - which the government blames on global warming - is a possible reason why the lake is blooming this year...