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Jellymageddon: Can we stop the rise of the jellyfish?

Acoustic shocks, electrocution, and robot shredders – extreme measures are being considered to tackle the increasing numbers of jellyfish in the oceans

By Tamar Stelling

13 July 2016

jellyfish

Alexander Semenov/getty

ANDREW Sweetman has spent a lot of time throwing dead jellyfish into the sea. At the bottom of the Sognefjord, Norway’s largest fjord, a time-lapse camera recorded their fate. He’s trying to answer a simple question: does anything eat jellyfish?

That neatly sums up how little we really know about those alien creatures. Jellyfish carrion carpets the seabed, suggesting it is not a favourite food.”Why would you eat a jellyfish?” asks Sweetman, who now works at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. “A jellyfish is 96 per cent water. You might as well just swim with your mouth open.”

For a long time, it didn’t matter that we knew so little about these animals. They were just a mucous mess that washed up on beaches, or a painful nuisance for swimmers. But then huge invading swarms – jellyfish blooms – started making the news. In their millions, jellyfish are capable of spectacular acts of sabotage. Yet nobody knows where these blooms come from or how to get rid of them. Time to ask more questions beyond whether anything eats them. Are numbers really going up? If so, why? More importantly, what can we do about it?

Jellyfish blooms can cause chaos. When the power went out on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in 1999, locals thought a long-feared military coup was under way. They were wrong. Sucked into water intakes, jellyfish had taken out vital services from power stations to data centres and water treatment plants. In 2006, a jellyfish bloom temporarily disabled the Ronald Reagan, one of the US navy’s flagship nuclear-powered supercarriers. Gelatinous bodies had clogged up…

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