A flotilla of mauve stingers, a kind of jellyfish that summers mostly in the Mediterranean, staked a claim on 10 miles of beach here and stayed through Memorial Day weekend, finally pulling out of town on Wednesday. The stingers — reddish and small, some no bigger than a golf ball — coated just about every inch of these beaches, —Lifeguards treated 1,800 people for jellyfish stings last week. A few were sent to hospitals after suffering allergic reactions.
Biologists say jellyfish are flourishing in warmer ocean waters and are washing up more frequently on to beaches.
First came hundreds of reports of jellyfish washing ashore in central Florida over the Memorial Day weekend. Since then, people have been spotting blooms of the gelatinous drifters off the coasts Connecticut, Virginia, and South Carolina, all earlier in the summer than expected.
The early appearance of jellyfish along the East Coast is more than just a nuisance for beachgoers. According to scientists, it’s a sign that coastal waters are warmer than usual for time of year, and recent studies suggest the early jellyfish blooms could upset the marine ecosystem in coastal areas, like Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
“The key thing with jellies is that they do everything so much faster than everything else, they grow and reproduce and are voracious predators, that other animals like fish can’t keep up,” says ecologist Rob Condon from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama.
For several years, Condon and colleagues from the Sea Lab and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) have been studying jellyfish that live in the York River, a southern tributary of Chesapeake Bay. They’ve discovered that rapidly-growing blooms of jellyfish are feeding on some of the most nutritious parts of the food web, including small crustaceans, and are converting them into products that sustain bacteria that leave little valuable energy supplies for fish and other sea life.
Many people don’t know that jellyfish populations have been on the rise for almost a decade now which directly affects the diet of people dependent upon fishing. Like a warming beer, warmer water looses dissolved gases including oxygen. Warm water and lower oxygen levels emulate the ocean environment 500-600 million years ago when jellyfish dominated aquatic life. On the flip side, the highest quality seafood comes from climates where the colder water can hold more oxygen (trout, salmon, arctic char, etc.)
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/06/11/june-11-2011/
Quote: Jellyfish can be quite beautiful, but they’re mysterious creatures. And it turns out that, at least ecologically speaking, they don’t play well with others. Dr. Robert Condon, a marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, has just done a study trying to understand the impact of jellyfish blooms on the marine food web. Normally, marine food webs are efficient recyclers of the energy-rich carbon that photosynthesizing phytoplankton make, and many species can benefit from it. However, jellyfish turn out to be a dead end for carbon. The carbon these voracious eaters excrete isn’t recycled and is lost to the marine food web.
Listen to the program for more information like: Japanese vessels are pulling up so much jellyfish mass that they have been known to capsize the boat.