Yaicha

I remember being terrified of jellyfish when I was a small child, but I don’t think I ever actually was stung by one. This NYT article about the dramatic increase in jellyfish along shorelines around the world is worrisome not just from a tourism standpoint. When nature sends us a message as loud as this one, we’d better listen. There’s no simple answer, of course — there never is to big problems.

Let’s just add it to the long list of daunting challenges we are facing these days…

clipped from www.nytimes.com “These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’” said Dr. Josep-Mara Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years. The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.