Alabama Mascot History... A must read!!!

I have been doing a lot of research lately on the Alabama mascot. Where does the crimson tide come from... what is it etc. This is what I discovered.

I wasn't sure if Alabama's mascot was plankton or diatoms or exactly what, so I google it up and discovered that Alabama's mascot is quote "algae, more specifically phytoplankton, are microscopic, single-celled protists" unquote.

So there you have it. A group of the Bama clan were apparently sitting around and bouncing mascot ideas around and it must have went something like this.

Gump1: "I vote for tigers"
Gump2: "I vote for eagles"
Gump3: "I vote for phytoplankton"
Gump1: "Yeah cool that is better than my idea"
Gump2: "Agreed, phytoplankton is better than eagles"

But upon further digging I discovered that this senerio might not be factual. There is a theory floating around that the original mascot was not phytoplankton at all but instead "discolored water" but evolved into phytoplankton over the years. Here is some more info that I uncovered. quote "Not all algal blooms are dense enough to cause water discolouration, and not all discoloured waters associated with algal blooms are red. Additionally, red tides are not typically associated with tidal movement of water"

So the second theory that is going around is that the original mascot was discolored water but a few Gumps weren't happy with that and over the years they slowly changed public perception that phytoplankton was the true mascot.

It might seem strange that the exact chain of events isn't documented somewhere. This can easily be explained by the fact that it wasn't until 1952 before anyone teaching or attending Alabama could read.

There is also some very good news that I have uncovered that I think a bunch of Tiger fans would be interested in hearing.

Here is a quote: "The most conspicuous effects of red tides are the associated wildlife mortalities among marine and coastal species of fish, birds, marine mammals and other organisms."

So not one mention of Tigers, apparently Tigers aren't one of the animals that are usually effected, so we should be good to go Saturday.