A recent study has revealed that jellyfish may be changing the rules of the so-called circle of ecological life. As the rule goes, one's trash is another's dinner, but for the marine creature, it appears to not be the case. Recent studies have shown that jellyfish waste is not edible, and can actually cause a number of bacteria to sink to the bottom of the ocean after smelling the waste. During a jellyfish bloom, food webs may thus be plucked and rearranged, configured to feed jellies that in turn feed almost nothing. Whether this represents the future of Earth's oceans depends on whom you ask, but it's an interesting phenomenon in itself. “Jellyfish are consuming more or less everything that's present in the food web,” said Robert Condon, a Virginia Institute of Marine Science and co-author of a jellyfish-impact study published June 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in comments published by Wired.com. “They're eating a lot of the food web, and turning it into gelatinous biomass. They're essentially stealing a lot of the energy, then putting it away,” he added. Condon and his co-authors are part of a research community whose attention has been recently transfixed by jellyfish, which evolved more than 500 million years ago and once dominated Earth's oceans, but until the late 20th century were of largely esoteric scientific interest. In the 1990s, however, jellyfish populations exploded in the Bering Sea, rising by a factor of 40 in less than a decade. By the time those blooms subsided, fishermen in the Sea of Japan were accustomed to 500-million-strong swarms of refrigerator-sized, ship-sinking Nomura jellyfish, their numbers unprecedented in recent memory. In the Mediterranean, once-seasonal jellies became a year-round fact of life, again wreaking fisheries havoc. The blooms became a matter of popular and scientific fascination. Some researchers talked of a “rise of slime,” interpreting the blooms as portents of a “gelatinous future” in which overfished, overpolluted and rapidly overheating marine ecosystems are overrun by algae and jellies. For now, scientists say more research is needed in order to determine the full extent of the jellyfish waste, but this report appears to reveal the devastating costs it could be having on our oceans. BM
