rise of the jellyfish...
Posted by
x (aka dmuck)
Oct 16 '13, 06:20
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"Last week, Sweden’s Oskarshamn nuclear power plant, which supplies 10% of the country’s energy, had to shut down one of its three reactors after a jellyfish invasion clogged the piping of its cooling system. The invader, a creature called a moon jellyfish, is 95% water and has no brain. Not what you might call menacing if you only had to deal with one or two.
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En masse, jellyfish are a bigger problem. “The [moon jellyfish swarm] phenomenon…occurs at regular intervals on Sweden’s three nuclear power plants,” says Torbjörn Larsson, a spokesperson for E.ON, which owns Oskarshamn. Larsson wouldn’t say how much revenue the shutdown cost his company, but noted that jellyfish also caused a shutdown in 2005.
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Coastal areas around the world have struggled with similar jellyfish blooms, as these population explosions are known. These blooms are increasing in intensity, frequency, or duration, says Lucas Brotz, a jellyfish expert at the University of British Columbia.
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Brotz’s research of 45 major marine ecosystems shows that 62% saw an uptick in blooms (pdf) since 1950. In those areas, surging jellyfish numbers have caused power plant outages, destroyed fisheries and cluttered the beaches of holiday destinations. (Scientists can’t be certain that blooms are rising because historical data are too few.)
The proliferation of jellyfish appears in large part to be related to humans’ impact on the oceans. The toll we take on the seas may augur a new world order of jellyfish disasters, which, in turn, could devastate the global economy.
Oskarshamn-like disturbances are happening all over the world. Throngs of jellyfish have disrupted power generation everywhere from Muscat to Maryland, from South Korea to Scotland. Things are worse in the fishing business, where blooms have wiped out billions of dollars in earnings over the last few decades. They’re also a nightmare for fishermen, who must contend with bursted nets and clogged trawl lines. Japan’s now-annual bloom of Nomura jellyfish, which each grow to be the size of large refrigerator, capsized and sank a 10-ton trawler when the fishermen tried to haul up a net full of them.
Tourism has taken a hit, too. This summer, a pileup of a million jellyfish along a 300 kilometer (186 miles) swath of Mediterranean coastline shortened swimming season for hundreds of thousands of tourists on beach holidays, reports The Guardian. Some 150,000 people are now treated for jellyfish stings in the Mediterranean each summer.
Those swimmers are getting off easy, though. Residents of Australia and Southeast Asia share shores with the dread box jellyfish, whose sting “is the most explosive envenomation process presently known to humans,” wrote a team of scientists. Venom injected from its 10-foot-long tentacles ”turns the tissue into soup,” as one marine biologist put it, and causes the heart to seize. Death usually occurs within four minutes. In the Philippines each year, between 20 and 40 people die from box jellyfish stings.
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Then there’s the Irukandji. The box jellyfish’s diminutive cousin, the Irukandji has mastered the closest thing to the perfect murder in the animal kingdom. Usually the size of a sugar cube, the Irukandji is hard to see, and its stinger leaves no trace. Around 10 minutes after contact, victims suffer everything from excruciating lower back pain to incessant vomiting to constricted airways and the “creeping” skin frequently associated with methamphetamine usage. Unlucky victims sometimes succumb to brain hemorrhaging, extreme high blood pressure or, in 30% of cases, experience some form of heart failure, according to Scientific American. And one out of five victims ends up on life support. “It’s difficult to know how many victims the Irukandji have claimed,” writes biologist Tim Flannery in a must-read piece, since “many deaths have doubtless been put down to stroke, heart attack or drowning.” "
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"No one’s sure how box jellyfish and the Irukandji are spreading. Jellyfish species are turning up in new habitats every year—and thriving. That’s probably because, from an evolutionary standpoint, jellyfish are biologically primed to swarm the seas. Here’s why:
--They have few predators. The ones they do have include sea turtles, salmon, mackerel and albatross—animals that are increasingly scarce. And of course, when they’re transported to new ecosystems, jellyfish often have no natural predators.
---They’re eating machines. The comb jellyfish, which wiped out the Black Sea’s $350 million fishing industry, can put away 10 times its body weight in food in a single day. This is even though it needs to eat only 16% of its body weight to keep growing. The rest of that food goes toward making it bigger and bigger.
--They play dirty against competitors. Not only do jellyfish compete with smaller fish for the same food, but they also eat those fishes’ eggs. That collapses fish populations.
--They’re world-class proliferators. Jellyfish don’t have baby versions of themselves the way most animals do. They create polyps—little bundles of clones—that attach to hard surfaces and wait for their opportunity to release small jellyfish. However, while they’re waiting, polyps clone themselves, creating more bundles of future baby jellyfish.
--They’re (almost) invincible. One reason jellyfish blooms are so disastrous is that they’re almost impossible to get rid of. In fact, cutting some species open actually creates exponentially more of them. When the cells of one species, named the Benjamin Button jellyfish, are released through post-mortem decomposition, they somehow find each other again and from a whole new polyp."
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