Jelly Fish Take Over

Well, East Asians like the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans do eat jellyfish. Maybe we can all do our part by catching them and exporting them to these countries.

Green Sea Turtles eat them with gusto, which is why they mistakenly eat plastic bags. There are a lot of sea critters out there that enjoy a feed of jelly fish.

The "blooms" of jellyfish occur occasionally, it is a natural part of the system.

Sometimes the sheer bulk of the bloom overwhelms the local environment but it is short lived.

There is disagreement about what causes these jelly fish blooms, but the fact is, we now have billions of these animals that are basically a dead-end of the food chain, because almost nothing eats them.

They are still part of the food chain, and like other life when they die they decompose and are re-absorbed back into the ecosystem and the food chain.

As for uses, there are plenty of them (some are even practical), for example

http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/2U37.html

Check out this link for the severity of the problem:

(cannot insert link) so just go to:

NSF.gov and search for jelly fish gone wild.

The blooms are much more severe than the last 50 years of record keeping, and they are considered by scientists to be a food chain dead end,due to the limited number of natural predators.

Link to 'text only'

on reading through, this is more journalism than 'science'.

I'm not sure how 1000 'fist size' jelly fish could survive in 1000 liters of water

The "problem" seems best summed up on this page

500 million refrigerator-sized jellyfish float into the Sea of Japan daily during blooms.

Something is wrong with that number. I mean 'daily' and 'refrigerator-sized'. That would roughly be 500.000.000 m³!! I just noticed my right leg extending, oh oh, it is growing!

Pull the other one somebody, Ky.

Maybe there was a typo.............should maybe read 500 million freezers packed with frozen jellyfish!!!!!!

<sigh>

NSF = we need to promote this "problem" wholesale so we can bang the drums and get the Feds to issue grants for us to "investigate" (note: not necessarily fix).

</sigh>

Hooker <-- who remembers jellyfish blooms in the Chesapeake Bay that alternate years with grasshoppers and cicada's.

And decomposition in and of itself means that something eats them, archaea, bacteria, fungi, worms or other micro-organisms maybe, but something. why do I always get the feeling that wildlife activists perceive life in such a narrow limited scope to those things they have identified that they like for some aesthetic reason, and nothing else rises to the status of living then.

Probably because the dinosaurs got wiped out--Hell! 50 years is a tear drop in the sad song of life--(Title of my new C/W song--On tour next month...)

When I was a kid I used to body surf at Torrance beach in Calif. Some summers the waters would be filled with black and purple streaked jellies. Me and my friends would go out and grab them (not the tentacles) and take them back up to the hot sand sand and bury them. We'd clear enough space to body surf for 15 or 20 minutes then clear some more!

They're part of the ocean system, I think you're overreacting.

Very interesting. Dewatering the jellyfish sounds difficult, but maybe it could be done with severe enough crossflow over a radial flow recirculating filter. The jellyfish shreds could be concentrated into a paste by high shear downstream of the filter.

In places like Rockport, TX the jellyfish bloom is so vast that it would be economical to set up a large-scale operation for dredging them out and concentrating the organic matter. There has to be some value in all of that protein. Maybe the cattle would like it to flavor their feedlot diet.

Jellyfish hot sauce for brave gastronauts is another attractive possibility.

Here in Spain the increase in jellyfish on the beaches is blamed on the overfishing of tuna in the Mediterranean. Sometimes boats go out and net them in the tourist season, but have heard nothing regarding industrial rendering of the catch.

I go to a nice Chinese eatery here in the states with my daughter and her boyfriend. We always order the Fried Jellyfish. I'm doing my share.

I have eaten jellyfish, I had some in a soup and some of it was mixed with other things together with a salad, it didn't taste very much to me, and is a bit chewy!

I have not read the entire article, but what I have read seems to indicate that it was sponsored by the fishing industry because the jelly fish are cutting into their profits.

So what is next seals and dolphins?

Of cause it does not help that we have been killing of the predators that eat them, such as turtles in those self same nets.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Well definitely the Seals they stink up the wharfs, hog up available wharf space, make all that noise, carry diseases, attact the wrong type of sharks into nice beaches, and bite tourist if they try to pet them.

I have heard that some dolphins can be excessively sexually aggressive with our females, so I guess for them at a minimum they would have to be imprisoned like any other sexual offender, try to rehabilitate them to function properly with human society, and register with the database thing the government has (for tracking purposes)