
They're Taking Over - jellyfish bloom and the future of the ocean. - teawithcarl
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/
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m4x
Her final statement (and in particular her final word) resonated quite
strongly with me. It's hard to know where the point of no return is on this
issue but I suspect that when it comes (and goes) it will be without fanfare.

It seems fairly clear at this point that as a race we're facing some fairly
substantial problems that need to be addressed if we want to avoid major
catastrophe, and yet almost without exception the people I speak to about
these issues are dismissive and unwilling to make even minor changes to their
lives. Nobody is willing to accept responsibility for the problems and
everybody believes they will somehow be resolved without their personal
intervention. Even as somebody who is genuinely concerned and willing to
accept responsibility, there seems to be nothing of worth that I can actually
do to help.

The scariest part is that we can well and truly pass the point of no return
before we even realise there's a problem to be addressed. This is true for
practically all the environmental issues we are facing. By the time we realise
how much we've upset a system and that awareness propagates down to a
significant proportion of the world's population, the damage is done and we
can't do anything to fix it. Some people do notice earlier, and some of those
people will jump up and down about it, but nothing real can change until a
significant proportion of the population is staring down the Gun Barrel of
Consequences. And so we just keep charging towards the bluff.

Her use of the word 'adapt' is quite prescient. Things are going to change; we
have so much momentum at this point that it is unavoidable. And as it happens
we will just have to ride it out as best we can. The thing that makes me
saddest now is not that I might personally suffer (although that certainly
used to worry me) but rather that we are going to destroy a lot that is quite
beautiful, and once it's gone we cannot bring it back. But life will go on,
and one day the world will probably be beautiful again.

~~~
pmorici
"It seems fairly clear at this point that as a race we're facing some fairly
substantial problems that need to be addressed if we want to avoid major
catastrophe"

I understand why this line of thinking is attractive but isn't it based on a
fiction? That being; if it weren't for interference from intelligent life,
humans, the earth would go on being in perfect environmental equilibrium for
all time. In reality the earth's environment has always been changing. Those
changes have been taking place since the beginning and many of them were the
result of the effects of various living organisms humans included.

So isn't the desire of humans to preserve 'our' environment, in it's present
state, in some sense a selfish desire to curtail the inevitable march of
environmental change which might threaten the species but would almost
certainly happen with or without us?

~~~
jfb
Well, sure, but that's so reductive as to be meaningless. There's a strong
element of self-interest in preserving an environment that we're well adapted
to, and as some of the changes threatening that environment are anthropogenic,
changing our behavior is a perfectly rational thing to do.

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raintrees
Well, it seems that we humans need to figure out how to do what we do best -
Eat a species back down to acceptable numbers.

Last time I tried jellyfish tentacles (American Chinese food restaurant), they
were rubbery and very chewy - Maybe flavor them and make a new gummy worm
substitution? Lasting longer than a jaw-breaker?

~~~
casperc
Exactly. If there are really tons of these things, why don't we find a use for
them (cold as it might seem)?

Food, (Animal food, human food. What can they be processed into, do they
contain any useful nutrients or protein, if so, blend them up, add something
to incapacitate the stingers, add flavour and et voilà: Soylent jellyfish!),
Fuel, Plastic, Medicine...Glue?

I mean it doesn't solve the underlying problems, but they might be a
relatively unexplored resource.

~~~
VLM
Fertilizer would appear to be the logical solution. Compost a giant pile of
them for six months and apply to fields.

Also let them rot into methane and burn the methane (probably combined with
option 1 above).

You can't make a decent compost with pure 100% jellyfish, but added to another
waste deficient in different nutrients, it might add up.

The article didn't discuss weaponization of jellyfish, which is the most
likely funding source. Shutting down a regions desal and power plants by
releasing a short lived poorly adapted jelly is a lot less visually impressive
than a bombing campaign, but probably a lot cheaper. Or rather than the
animals themselves, dump food for them, perhaps.

~~~
thotpoizn
This would make for an interesting experiment. Anaerobic digesters would
presumably make short work of any toxin proteins, and you could probably get a
fairly high jellyfish to "other" feedstocks [ratio] while retaining a
commercially viable fertilizer (plus plenty of usable methane) as end
products.

That said, I doubt that the cost to harvest and transport would be competitive
with more conventional feedstocks such as slaughterhouse leavings, crop wastes
/ stalks, and plain old manure.

Food for thought, anyway. Floating digester platforms, maybe?

[edit: added missing word 'ratio']

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hrvbr
Of course they're taking over. We are provoking a massive extinction of
species in the oceans. Jellyfish are the one group of species we have no use
for, so they're taking the free space we give them while enjoying the
disappearing of their predators.

~~~
jafaku
I didn't read the article but I saw a documentary on the subject. It said that
they take over because the reproduce like rabbits, can live everywhere (in the
sea), and kill anything they come across. It's not something we caused, or at
least there isn't evidence about that.

~~~
marquis
Hm, and after some hundreds of thousands of years to have the opportunity to
do this, jellyfish randomly decide to start doing this in the 20th century?

~~~
wavefunction
According to the article, hundreds of millions of years for the jellyfish to
do this.

I share your suspicions about the coincidental rise of jellyfish and modern
mankind.

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shavenwarthog2
I saw the author, my friend Lisa-ann Gerswhin give a talk recently. The
startling points I came away with are: 1) There are several strong self-
reinforcing loops that dramatically help jellyfish, at the expense of human-
valued things -- like fish. 2) Jellyfish are becoming so abundant they're
jamming water inlets... to nuclear power plants and everything else. 3)
Jellyfish can eat stuff (fish), but nothing can eat jellyfish -- they're a
completely different food chain.

~~~
craigyk
Lots of things eat jellyfish, or more commonly, their young. We're just
killing the predators off.

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socialist_coder
I've been thinking about the next 50 years a lot. Climate change, the state of
our oceans, the lack of corporate & human morality to reverse or even slow
down the rape and pillaging of our planet.

I don't see any indication that we're not on a path to surefire destruction.
Climate change is happening. The sea level is rising. And as this article (and
many more) points out- it's a snowball effect. Faster and faster. When will it
stop? When will governments actually take notice and do something about it?

I don't think that the earth in 50 years will be able to support nearly as
many people as it has now. We're going to see massive migration, famine, and
starvation. We'll have to learn to live on our new planet, one that isn't
quite as nutritious as this one, has a worse climate, and even less habitable
surface area.

I actually have my fingers crossed for something drastic to happen before
that. We need a silver bullet. This could be something good like a new energy
technology- or it could be something bad like a disease that wipes out 50% of
the earth's population. In any case, staying the course is not something I
want to do. We're headed right for disaster.

~~~
abraham_s
Is cheap energy, solar or fusion, one candidate for "silver bullet"?

~~~
socialist_coder
If it displaces fossil fuels, definitely.

It still wouldn't change the tons and tons of nitrogen fertilizer runoff that
is going into our oceans and creating the oxygen poor "dead zones".

Nor would it stop every seafaring nation on the planet from overfishing (they
all do).

And don't forget all that radiation from Fukashima that's already in the
Pacific.

But at least it would help the CO2 problem. It might be too late for that
however. The current CO2 is already in our atmosphere, so unless we have a
really good method (and the resources and want to implement that plan) to fix
it back into the ground we're still going to see it's accumulated effects.
Combine that with the already smaller polar ice caps which aren't reflecting
as much sun and we might already be past the point of no return.

I dunno, I think we're fucked and there's really no solution other than a
drastic decrease in the human population.

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Swannie
Incredible. How is this the first time I'm reading about this topic!

This is a lot more concerning than the widely publicized reduction in shark
numbers. Though that particular problem is easier to fix.

I wonder if more marine reserves would help resolve some of these problems, by
allowing a place for natural ecosystem balance to be restored. Or if rising
temperature and acidity is just to prevailing for that to be effective.

~~~
nly
The loss of shark isn't a different problem, it's just another facet of the
same thing.

From Wikipedia:

"[Jellyfish] predators include tuna, shark, swordfish, sea turtles and at
least one species of Pacific salmon."

...i.e. a list of fisherman favourites

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DanBC
The toxic jellyfish are interesting because they are _so_ toxic, but we don't
know much about the toxin.

Here's a YouTube clip of some volunteers who gave themselves jellyfish stings.
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK_Cl_54Qh8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK_Cl_54Qh8))
It looks intensely painful!

> It had presumably arrived in ballast water.

I'm kind of surprised that ballast water isn't somehow sterilised - boil it
for 30 minutes or have strong UV lamps in the tank with water filtering over
it?

~~~
Recoil42
>I'm kind of surprised that ballast water isn't somehow sterilised

Ballast water probably has too much mass to be boiled cost-effectively. We're
talking thousands of tonnes of water in some cases.

UV isn't a bad idea, but probably wouldn't work well for well-protected
species like bivalve molluscs. Unfortunately, those are some of the most
invasive species that we have -- see Zebra Mussels, for instance.

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d4m0
Turtles.

Lots of turtles.

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nwh
Amazing for a species which—baring the box jellyfish—have absolutely no
brains.

~~~
Ygg2
I think the article implies that we helped it... a lot.

Unless you count poison, which isn't that special. Lots of plants use it.

~~~
nwh
They've not had our help for tens of millions of years though.

~~~
Ygg2
That is besides the point. I think you'd agree that condition now and millions
of years ago were quite, quite different. They were held in check by various
predators, we eliminated. Shells weaken by acidification of ocean have put new
new sort of organism on their menu (or weakened their prey).

The fact that our efforts of only several decades/centuries could return
jellies to a state that was 10 million of years ago is astounding.

------
Sagat
The future of humanity is 99% water.

~~~
Ygg2
Or 30% more acid in water.

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cmollis
great.

