On a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a few years back, Shauna and David Schober were snorkeling off the coast with a tour company that took them by boat to explore some underwater caves. But their snorkel excursion was cut short when less than a mile away a cruise ship discharged its septic tanks.

"As it was passing, the water behind it was bubbling up out of the back with almost like a sick green algae substance," Shauna Schober said. "It looked like sewage, and you could smell it - like it was treated with chemicals, almost like it smells in a porta-potty."

The tour guides said: Get out of the water. "They said the cruise ship was dumping its tanks and it was better not to be in the water," she said.

The cruise line industry relies on pristine oceans, beautiful coral reefs and marine life to draw millions of travelers on cruise vacations each year. But the same ships that advertise excursions to untouched ocean scenery are threatening these very same natural resources with their standard practice of flushing harmful toxins, mostly as sewage and food waste, into the ocean.

These problems are not new or unknown. But the cruise line industry has been operating effectively with little federal government oversight for much of the past decade since Department of Justice in the late 1990s indicted the top three cruise companies for dumping oily bilge water (the stagnate oil and water that collect in the ship's hull). Investigators found that ships had installed pipes - hidden in hand rails on some ships - that allowed crew members to bypass oil separators intended to purify the bilge water.

The resulting $52 million combined settlement - Royal Caribbean having paid out the most at $30.8 million - also created a probationary period where ships were required to maintain an environmental officer with a direct line to management. The probationary period has since expired and the federal government now has no authority to determine if the environmental officers are qualified and monitoring cruise line compliance with environmental laws.

One of the environmental officers hired as a result of the probation was Walter Nadolny, who worked on board Carnival Cruise Lines and Norwegian Cruise Lines between 2001 and 2005. He is now an assistant professor at the State University of New York Maritime College. Nadolny said it's the pure volume of material discharged into the ocean that concerned him most.

Aside from sewage, Nadolny said food waste - which isn't regulated at all - strikes him as a greater concern. The average cruise ship serves between 10,000 and 12,000 meals per day. On a ship of 5,000 people eating four to five meals a day, the total is closer to 25,000 meals. Food waste is then ground up, put into a holding tank and discharged as food slurry. The putrefying food waste creates acid. In the ocean, it lowers oxygen and increases nutrients in the water, based on an EPA report in 2008 on cruise ship pollution discharge.

"This massive amount of food starts self digesting and becomes this extremely acidic mess, probably worse than raw sewage," Nadolny said. "At least with raw sewage, somebody's digested it. It's not so much feeding the fish as it is dumping an acidic mass in the water that can harm coral reefs."

As the probationary period ended, many cruise lines replaced their compliance officers with less trained, lower paid personnel who have greater reason to want to keep their job than to blow the whistle on environmental violations, according to Ross Klein, Ph.D., an author of numerous books critical of the cruise line industry.

"One of my informants at Royal Caribbean said they were increasingly getting rid of their American, English speaking people and hiring Filipinos, not necessarily environmental scientists, but crew members who were put through a week of training and became an environmental officer," Klein said. "Because they were being paid much better than they were before, these people were less likely to stand up to the company."

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