Ocean dead zones invaded by jellyfish that ruin fishing and tourism
By Maggie Fox, editing by Philip Barbara WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Huge swarms of stinging jellyfish and similar slimy animals are ruining beaches in Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, Australia and elsewhere, U.S. researchers reported on Friday. … The report, available on the Internet at http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/index.jsp, says the Black Sea’s fishing and tourism industries have lost $350 million because of a proliferation of comb jelly fish. The report says more than 1,000 fist-sized comb jellies can be found in a cubic yard (meter) of Black Sea water during a bloom. They eat the eggs of fish and compete with them for food, wiping out the livelihoods of fishermen, according to the report. And it says a third of the total weight of all life in California’s Monterey Bay is made up of jellyfish. … "There is clear, clean evidence that certain types of human-caused environmental stresses are triggering jellyfish swarms in some locations," William Hamner of the University of California Los Angeles says in the report. These include pollution-induced "dead zones", higher water temperatures and the spread of alien jellyfish species by shipping.