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+--- Thread: Imperiled seas: The Jellyfish Apocalypse (/thread-4619.html)
Imperiled seas: The Jellyfish Apocalypse - C C - Dec 8, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/listening-to-jellyfish/546542/
EXCERPT: The most common Irukandji [jellyfish] are the size of a chickpea, and because they’re colorless, in the ocean they’re more or less invisible. The smaller ones might appear to you as the residue of a sneeze. [...] The jellyfish’s sting doesn’t hurt overmuch. [...] You might miss the prick of its microscopic, stinging darts. You might think it’s just the start of sunburn. Worst-case scenario: You’re dead by the following sunset. [...] After the initial sting comes a procession of ever more dreadful symptoms: back pain, agitation, the sensation of crawling skin, vomiting. The heart can become arrhythmic. Fluid may build up in and around the lungs. Patients “beg their doctors to kill them, just to get it over with,” the marine biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin told ABC Radio National in 2007.
[...] in recent decades jellyfish species have come to be thought of as [...] inheritors of our imperiled seas. Jellyfish blooms—the intermittent, and now widely reported, flourishing of vast swarms—are held by many to augur the depletion of marine biomes; they are seen as a signal that the oceans have been overwarmed, overfished, acidified, and befouled. [...] A jellyfish-dominated sea is conceived of as the sea of prehistory [...] the Mar Menor lagoon, which had become so jellified in 2002 that “you couldn’t drive a boat through the water.” [...]
Do jellyfish, in fact, deserve their reputation as an oceanic menace? [...] Juli Berwald [...] proceeds to take apart the evidence underpinning depictions of jellyfish as both passive indicators of sickening seas and drivers of environmental atrophy. The ubiquity of jellyfish, she finds, masks a plurality of stories—some well substantiated, others only speculative. The demonization of jellyfish, as Berwald frames it, correlates with the new visibility of the creatures. As underwater technologies have become more fine-tuned [...] jellyfish have swerved into focus. Are their numbers increasing, or are contemporary scientists now capable of observing profusions that once went under the radar? Jellyfish blooms may occur at intervals that pre-date their surveillance—spreading, say, in 20-year cycles. What looks to us like an aberrance could, viewed in a longer time frame, prove natural.
[...] Perhaps the most complex issue Berwald takes on is jellyfish blackouts. Sweden, Scotland, the Philippines, Tokyo, California, and Israel have all suffered intermittent electrical outages caused by jellyfish sucked into the intake pipes and cooling systems of coal-fired and nuclear power stations. [...] Desalination plants likewise have had to go offline when jellyfish have clogged their conduits and filters. The significance of such damage will only increase as on-land freshwater resources degrade and electricity demand grows. In cities experiencing greater temperature extremes, blackouts expose particularly consequential frailties—refrigeration, air-conditioning and heating, and transportation all matter more in hard weather. These jellyfish–human interactions, Berwald suggests, may say less about their encroachment than about ours....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/listening-to-jellyfish/546542/
RE: Imperiled seas: The Jellyfish Apocalypse - RainbowUnicorn - Dec 18, 2017