41% of the United States drains into the Mississippi river then out into the Gulf of Mexico, that’s a total of 3,200,000 km² of land or about 600 million football fields. About 12 million people live in urban areas that border the Mississippi, all of those people constantly discharge treated sewage into the rivers, however the majority of the land in the Mississippi’s watershed is farmland. Each spring as farmers fertilize their lands preparing for crop season, rain washes fertilizer off the land and ultimately down into the ocean. All the urban and farm discharges include nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that are very important for the growth of phytoplankton. Incredibly about 1.7 million tons of these nutrients are dumped into the Gulf of Mexico every