Jelly Belly Not Exactly Swelly

Summer is upon us! Some live by a warm shore. Others are lucky enough to travel to a warm beachy area. For those who are heading to warm salty waters, sun basking with a watery swim on their minds, a warning. For those not able to beach-it-up, a justification beyond, “I can’t afford a vacation this year.” But remember, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service’s National Survey on Recreation and the Environment, over 50 million Americans find a way to swim in the sea every year. But the warning information comes from a study of the rather rapid acceleration of the number of fun jellyfish in ocean waters of late as illustrated in a study from the University of British Columbia (Increasing jellyfish populations: trends in Large Marine Ecosystems, April 2012).

“Every year around the world there are an estimated 150 million jellyfish stings, according to recent research. In the United States, jellyfish are blamed for half a million stings in the Chesapeake Bay and up to 200,000 stings in Florida waters.” MotherJones.com, June 30^th. Most are not a whole lot worse than bee stings. While there are not a lot of fatal jellyfish attacks every year, there are a whole lot more than people dying from shark attacks. But (butt?) it’s not just a sting that with certain species of the critters – such as the Chironex fleckeri or the tiny Irukandji jellyfish found primarily in the northern coastal waters off Australia or the Philippines (but a few have been discovered off the coast of Florida) whose stings are usually fatal – that is causing concern. The impact of the swelling ranks of jellyfish has other unexpected results.

The UBC report concludes that “‘jellyfish populations appear to be increasing in the majority of the world's coastal ecosystems and seas,’ and blamed human activity for these blooms. The areas most affected are the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, says Lucas Brotz, a PhD student and jellyfish expert at University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center, and co-author of the report.

“The influx of jellyfish can cause big problems. In October last year, a gelatinous swarm plugged cooling pipes for one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, on the Baltic coast in Sweden, shutting it down. A swarm hobbled a coal-fired power plant near Hadera on the Israeli coast in 2011. Millions of bulging, translucent creatures descended on popular Mediterranean beaches in April 2013, freaking out the tourists. Jellyfish expert Lisa-ann Gershwin writes in her 2013 book Stung! that jellyfish caused the collapse of the $350 million Black Sea fishing industry in the 1990s. In 2007, a plague wiped out a salmon farm off Northern Ireland.” MotherJones.com.

These critters aren’t even deterred by de-oxygenated dead zones surrounding some major port areas around the world; they can exist in ocean waters with depleted oxygen stores. There are multiple causes for this effect: “There are other factors driving population booms, of course, aside from global warming: Over-fishing has also killed off the jellyfish's natural predators: fish. Pollution and ocean acidification may also be playing their parts in this complex story.” MotherJones.com.

Aside from occasional swarms, such as an outbreak off Northern California waters of a rather benign version of this pest, the United States seems to be less impacted than, say, Europe. But will a warming trend in our littoral regions create new threats? “‘Warmer water species are going to start to have more and more areas where they can expand their range into,’ [says Lucas Brotz]. Scientists have already observed this phenomenon in Australia's jellyfish. Brotz expects that in the United States, especially on the East Coast, jellyfish will also begin ‘showing up earlier and sticking around for longer into the fall.’

While jellyfish appear to be really loving global warming, they could also be driving the change, writes Australian scientist Tim Flannery: ‘Remarkably, jellyfish may have the capacity to accelerate climate change, he writes. ‘Jellyfish release carbon-rich feces and mucus (poo and goo) that bacteria prefer to use for respiration,’ turning the bacteria into carbon-making factories, accelerating warming. A gelatinous feedback loop.” MotherJones.com. Lovely visual.

Whatever the cause, there are more jellyfish than ever, a statistics that just keeps on growing. Pollution, overfishing and global warming will insure that result.  Here’s one solution, especially popular in parts of Asia: eat them! There are 12 species of edible jellyfish. Yum! Or change our rather radical consumption patterns that have such radical and unexpected results. How about both?

At least the shark menace is lower, right? No? “According to a report from Discovery News, shark experts have predicted that there will be more shark attacks this summer in the U.S. than there were last summer. But why the rise?... George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, attributes it to three main reasons: More people entering the ocean every year, a recently observed rise of great white sharks in the ocean and global climate change that ‘has resulted in warmer waters to the north, prompting humans to enter waters earlier in the season’ and stay in them later, Burgess told Discovery News.

Last year there were a total of 47 shark attacks in the U.S., with two of them ending in a fatality. The states with the highest number of shark attacks that occurred last year, according to the International Shark Attack File, are as follows: Florida with 23 attacks, Hawaii with 13 and South Carolina with six. California, North Carolina, Texas, Oregon and Alabama each reported one shark attack… And if you're beginning to think sharks are the problem, consider this: for every human killed by a shark, humans kill approximately two million sharks, according to National Geographic.” Huffington Post, June 3^rd. Ugh! Sharks attacking me? Nope. Professional courtesy!

I’m Peter Dekom, and this is just one more example of man’s complex impact on our once delicately-balanced global ecosystem.