Famous beach closes after too many tourists pee in the sea
Recently it was announced that Maya Bay in Thailand, the piece of paradise made famous by the 2000 Leonardo DiCaprio film The Beach is to be closed indefinitely.
You could blame this on the damage done to the ecology of the beach by the 6,000 tourists who have visited it daily over the past 18 years. You could also blame another culprit.
According to local tour operators, many of those tourists pee in the sea and, together with the urine that boats dump into the bay from their toilets, this is causing damage to the coral and other marine life in the vicinity.
However, while research has shown peeing in smaller, contained, bodies of water, such as swimming pools, is potentially hazardous to the health of the water and fellow swimmers, when it comes to large bodies of water, such as the ocean, it’s not necessarily the case.
Urine is 95% water but does contain other things, among them sodium, chloride, waste products, like urea, and trace amounts of the things we put into our bodies, such as antibiotics and contraceptive pills, as well as small amounts of bacteria.
Don’t even think of doing a number two – faeces is not good for anyone or anything in the sea as it contains gut bacteria that are directly linked to diseases in coral.
The moral of the story for sea lovers and DiCaprio fans alike is that if you’re enjoying yourself in a gentle, coral-filled body of idyllic but still ocean, hold it in until you reach the nearest loo – for the good of the ocean and its millions of dwellers.