Is the world ready for this jelly?

You can't tell from the photo, but this jellyfish is huge. Nomura jellyfish, native to the waters off China and Japan, can grow to be the size of a refrigerator, and weigh up to 400 pounds. And, since the 1990s, there's a lot more of them. Swarms, 500 million jellies strong, have sunk ships, writes Brandon Keim in Wired. It's part of a global increase in jellyfish populations. Right now, nobody's sure whether this is a blip, or a new normal. But everybody would like to know how jellyfish affect ecosystems, and new research offers some sobering analysis.

In what may be the most comprehensive jellyfish study to date, Condon's group spent nearly four years gathering data from Chesapeake Bay on Mnemiopsis leidyi and Chrysaora quinquecirrha, two species that have caused trouble elsewhere and are considered representative of jellyfish habits worldwide.

The researchers counted them at sea, measured the nutrients in surrounding water, and calculated the composition of nearby bacterial communities. In the lab, they observed how bacteria in seawater reacted to jellyfish, and tracked chemicals flowing through their aquariums.

They found that jellyfish, like many other marine species, excrete organic compounds as bodily wastes and as slime that covers their bodies. But whereas the excretions of other species are consumed by bacteria that form important parts of oceanic food webs, jellyfish excretions nourish gammaproteobacteria, a class of microbes that little else in the ocean likes to eat, and that produces little of further biological use.

"Lots of marine creatures make this dissolved organic matter that bacteria use to live. But the point of this paper is that the organic matter produced by jellies doesn't make it back up the food web," said study co-author Deborah Steinberg, also a Virginia Institute of Marine Science biologist. "When jellies are around, they're shunting this energy into a form that's just not very usable. They're just shunting energy away from the rest of the food web."

Nomura jellyfish photo by KENPEI, used via CC

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Anonymous

hmmm . . . Think of Wall Street capitalists as the jelly fish of our economy.
Tau’ma

Sphere Best Scene http://youtu.be/8isTBU3gxB0
Ralf Muschall

To everybody who thinks that the evil jellies at least help with carbon fixation: No, not even that, they steal carbon and increase the CO2 output. The Wired article (second link in the announcement) has a diagram of the carbon cycle with and without jellies.
Anonymous

“When jellies are around, they’re shunting this energy into a form that’s just not very usable. They’re just shunting energy away from the rest of the food web.”

Kind of like people?
Anonymous

So, do they cause gammaphobia?
billstewart

They look like that, live in the ocean, and they’re stealing away Earth’s carbon cycle? Cthulhu!

Jellyfish are a pretty common appetizer in some kinds of Chinese restaurants, served cold and usually relatively plain but occasionally with spicy stuff or sesame.
inkfumes

Hey, I need that food web, I eat from it all the time. Are going to be shunted into extinction?
Mujokan

“When jellies are around, they’re shunting this energy into a form that’s just not very usable. They’re just shunting energy away from the rest of the food web.”

Reaganomics.
inkfumes

sorry, typo! “we”
Anonymous

This is exactly why there can never be too many awesome sunfish.

Fact: Sunfish are fish.
Fact: the entire purpose of a sunfish is to languidly flip out and eat jellies.
Fact: sunfish are totally sweet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_sunfish
xzzy

What is the likelihood that a rise in jellyfish population coincides with a decline in fish population, perhaps due to over-fishing?

Do fish compete with jellyfish for food, or do they have some other suppressive effect on jellyfish?
hassenpfeffer

Guess we’re gonna have to start liking jellyfish excretions and gammaproteobacteria. Any of you paleo-munchers want first crack?
awjtawjt

The very next BoingBoing post had BETTER be a tentacley thing, for the Jellyfish/Cthulu/FSM trifecta!!!
- nosehat
  
  Yes, please a post on the flying spaghetti monster next! :)
rosycoeur

“The organic matter produced by jellies doesn’t make it back up the food web…”

…for now.

Seriously, are there barriers to species adapting to eating gammaproteobacteria? I.e. are they anaerobic and living in sulpher vents where oxygen breathing species can’t survive?

Or do we just need to get some modernist chefs on this?
- Anonymous
  
  There are probably barriers to them doing so in time to ensure that entire existing ecosystems don’t suffer. In the long run, maybe things balance out, but then, in evolutionary terms, we and our kids and grandkids all live in the short run.
- noen
  
  “Seriously, are there barriers to species adapting to eating gammaproteobacteria? I.e. are they anaerobic and living in sulpher vents where oxygen breathing species can’t survive?”
  
  Yes, you’ve got that exactly right. “An exceeding number of important pathogens belongs to this class” including salmonella, the plague and cholera. They oxidize hydrogen sulfide and excrete sulfur. So yeah, a slight obstacle there.
Rich Keller

Ocean sunfish eat jellyfish and so do some Japanese gourmands. All we have to do is get the diners to be buried at sea when the time comes in order to return their nutrients back to the ocean.

http://pinktentacle.com/2006/08/chefs-prepare-for-annual-giant-jellyfish-invasion/
badmigraine

It seems a rather sweeping conclusion to say their organic excretions don’t back up the food web. This sounds a lot like doctors in the 1960s removing adenoids as a matter of course because nobody knew what they did–therefore they have no good function. It’s easier to believe that the jellyfish study wasn’t comprehensive enough to reveal the function of the excretions in the food web. Or that if the organic excretions of the massive oceanic population of jellyfish were consumed by the usual bacteria, then everything else would go whacky. Or any one of a dozen other things. It’s elementary that there is a balance in the “food web” because that is one of its essential characteristics. The study was done in connection with the inquiry about whether a balance in the jellyfish population has been disturbed, but that question is unrelated to this surprising conclusion about the apparent lack function of jellyfish secretions in the food web.
Kosmoid

How is this story “sobering”? Do we normally walk around in an intoxicated state until some blog post snaps us back to reality?
- Mujokan
  
  You mean you don’t?
Anonymous

Jellyfish are not like metroids or Cthulu. Cthulu and metroids are like jellyfish. Man, it’s like you guys have spent more time on-line than in the ocean.
Anonymous

Just FYI, ocean sunfish taste so bad nobody eats them. That’s how come they get so gigantic… ocean sunfish the size of volkswagens are no big deal.
apennydreadful

: hey, any scientists want to find some way to use these for the good of mankind? ideas:

biofuel
jelly
Chuck

Somebody check to make sure those jellyfish aren’t undead.

Jellyfish: the zombies of the sea.
Anonymous

@Kosmoid: sobering = making one thoughtful or sober (m-w.com). So it’s not incorrect, just the slightly more metaphoric sense of the word.
Cook!EMonstA

I remember going to a Zoo camp with my 6 year old daughter about the oceans. The zoologist made a point of explaining to the kids that scientists had decided to change the names of Starfish and Jellyfish because they are not actually fish. We found this rather amusing and have since taken to calling these creatures Jelly-not-fish.
promethean

Jellyfish my ass, that’s a mother fuckin’ Metroid!
Anonymous

If it’s energy that doesn’t go up the food chain is there any chance this locks up carbon?
Zan

In defense of the big jellyfish, they don’t actually sink ships. The source of that factoid is the article at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/6483758/Japanese-fishing-trawler-sunk-by-giant-jellyfish.html which states that a fishing vessel tipped over while they were trying to haul in a heavy net containing several Nomura jellyfish. Hauling in a too heavy load caused the boat to sink, not the jellyfish themselves.
Anonymous

sounds like humans
MandoSpaz

Bah -

There’s no such thing as a jellyfish!
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  In an alternate universe, jellyfish are candy and gummi bears terrorize campers.
holtt

I think I saw one of those on SpongeBob once
sharkcellar

The obvious question is “are they edible?”.
- Layne
  
  Yeah, they are actually edible. I had one at a sushi place near home. Personally, not what I’d normally crave, but no worse than other things I’ve eaten at a sushi bar (I’m looking at YOU Sea Urchin).
  
  Not a bad idea for targeting invasive species – make em gourmet. Down in the Keys they are hosting Lionfish hunts and turning them into ceviche. Even made a cookbook about it.
Samurai Gratz

Am I the only person who thinks that BoingBoing headline would make a great t-shirt?
arbitraryaardvark

http://www.springerlink.com/content/x7204250k4174gwt/
jellynotfish as food
holtt

See also Jellyfishing
jerwin

Alas, the ocean sunfish does not travel unmolested. From that wikipedia article:

“Sunfish are accidentally but frequently caught in drift gillnet fisheries, making up nearly 30% of the total catch of the swordfish fishery employing drift gillnet in California. The by-catch rate is even higher for the Mediterranean swordfish industry, with 71% to 90% of the total catch being sunfish/
The fishery by-catch and destruction of ocean sunfish are unregulated worldwide. In some areas, the fish are “finned” by fishermen who regard them as worthless bait thieves; this process, in which the fins are cut off, results in the eventual death of the fish, because it can no longer propel itself without its dorsal and anal fins. The species is also threatened by floating litter such as plastic bags which resemble jellyfish, its main food. Bags can choke and suffocate an individual or fill its stomach to the extent that it starves.“
- Anonymous
  
  Which is why Sunfish Michael Pollan advocates that molas not eat anything that their great-grandmothers would not have recognizes as jellyfish.
Bubba

“jellyfish excretions nourish gammaproteobacteria, a class of microbes that little else in the ocean likes to eat”

They shouldn’t worry, something will be along in a few hundred thousand/million years that’ll gobble that stuff right up.
Anonymous

You guys are on the wrong side. These jellyfish are fixing carbon.
markyoshi

the Destiny’s Child referencing headline is so, so good.
Anonymous

I think the question has been answered for us. Human liver cells and jellyfish protein nake living lasers!!

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-06/using-human-cells-and-jellyfish-protein-researchers-build-first-living-laser
Anonymous

“They’re just shunting energy away from the rest of the food web.”"

That sounds like carbon fixation. If organics are not being ate, then what else is happening to them?
Nadreck

Oh well, back to the Proterozoic.