NSF Reports on Jellyfish Gone Wild
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles 
on 12.14.08
Image from Monty Graham/Dauphin Island Sea Lab
If you have any interest whatsoever in jellyfish—and, really, who doesn't?—then you should head on over to the National Science Foundation (NSF) website and read their special report on the environmental causes and ramifications of large jellyfish swarms. The interactive site is chock-full of videos, pictures (of course), interesting trivia (for example: a single jellyfish may release up to 45,000 eggs in a day) and several excellent primers on the species' ecology and swarm behavior.
Image from NOAA
It's no secret that jellyfish have slowly, but steadily, begun taking over the oceans in recent years. Thanks to climate change, overfishing, habitat deterioration and other anthropogenic impacts, jellyfish have flourished, both in size and in sheer numbers, often forming swarms of hundreds of millions of organisms.
The Japanese had a harrowing experience in the summer of 2005 when almost 500 million jellyfish—each weighing around 450 pounds—took up residence in the Sea of Japan on a daily basis. On a global scale, the massive swarms have cost the fishing and tourism industries hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of dollars in damage since 1980.
As Kimberley wrote about a few months ago, many biologists believe the growing presence of these gelatinous, seemingly innocuous, creatures signals that something is deeply wrong with the world's marine ecosystems. If the pace of their invasion is any indication, it may already be too late to save some of the most vulnerable ones.
Though jellyfish populations typically rise and fall over a 16 to 18-year period, their natural life and reproductive cycles seem to have accelerated under conditions of global warming and anthropogenic impact; indeed, 2008 marked the eight consecutive year that their numbers continued their meteoric rise.
Here are a few more interesting tidbits you'll find on the NSF's website:
1 microsecond is the time it takes a jellyfish stinger to hit its target. The discharge of the jellyfish's stinger is among the fastest movements in nature.
1/3 of the total weight of all life in Monterey Bay is from gelatinous animals.
20-40 people are killed annually from box jellyfish stings in the Philippines alone.
Some of the areas that have witnessed the largest increases in numbers—and the most spectacular swarms—include Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico, the Bering Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, Australia, the Black Sea and the North Sea. You can see the full breakdown of swarm locations in recent years here.
More about jellyfish
Huge Jellyfish Numbers "Signal Something Has Changed" in Oceans
Jellyfish: Coming to a Beach Near You
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Do some people eat jellyfish as food? Could we stop raising as much cattle and instead eat the jellyfish? It seems that we have killed off most of the natural predators of the jellyfish -- shouldn't we then ethically become one of the predators in a big way, especially if we are increasing their numbers tremendously -- partly by raising cattle who emit GHG and who often foul the waters. Would this scale up - are problems with scaling the reason we do not see it happening more?
Similar to the previous poster, can these jellyfish be used for feed to some land animals? Or used in some other beneficial way?
jellyfish...well ive seen on tv that they shouldnt get stabbed so i had the idea-why dont we fish these out- dry them and use them as biomass fuel?
Ummm... People, buy a clue! Jellyfish is served in Chinese restaurants right here in the USA! Have had it numerous times in the Los Angeles area! It looks like noodles and has little flavor of its own. As I have read elsewhere, unfortunately, jellyfish has little nutritive value.
The jellyfish blooms to me are like the 'blooms' of a dying tree -- many have seen an old or otherwise dying tree break out with an abundance of flowers and fruit in a last-ditch effort to propagate.
Turtles eat jelly fish; particularly the leatherback--almost extinct in many places.
Leatherbacks can weigh up to a ton(727kg) and are making a come back.Its thru a lot of hard work by a large group of dedicated people. A 2000 lb. turtle can eat a lot of jellyfish .
We should develop propulsion engines fueled by dried jellyfish. Our oil issues would be over!
When the ocean was more acidic in the past, jellyfish reined supreme. Currently the carbon cycle is out of wack because we are digging up carbon from the geosphere and putting it into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel for energy. The only feasible strategy to rebalance the carbon cycle is to remove the carbon from the air and put it back into the ground. Since doing it mechanically would take a tremendous amount of energy (that would have to be generated by burning more fossil fuel, thereby putting even more carbon into the atmosphere), we will have to do it biologically. I suggest seeding a GMO (genetically modified organism) into the ocean to do the job: the jellyfish would be a great template for genetic modification.