“…Although typically found offshore, unusual accumulations of Sargassum dubbed “golden tides” (Smetacek & Zingone, ), began washing ashore on islands in the Caribbean during 2011 then again in 2014 and 2015, burying beaches, impacting coastal fisheries, restricting harbors, and smothering sea turtle nests (Maurer et al., ). Reports of golden tides like those in the Caribbean have also been reported in western Africa and Brazil (De Széchy, Guedes, Baeta‐Neves, & Oliveira, ; Smetacek & Zingone, ) impacting tourism, food security, and the limited budgets of coastal towns trying to remove the rotting biomass from their beaches. Whether these golden tides represent changes in distribution of existing biomass or result from unusual accumulations due to higher growth rates (“blooms”) has not been established, but the most popular hypothesis is that nutrients supplied by the Amazon and Congo River basins, and also equatorial and coastal upwelling regions along west Africa are allowing fast‐growing Sargassum to reach very high concentrations in an area known as the North Equatorial Recirculation Region (NERR, Figure ), with subsequent flushing toward the Caribbean (Johnson, Ko, Franks, Moreno, & Sanchez‐Rubio, ).…”