Nettles Make Seas Lethal for Swimmers — More Reason to Respect Nature
|November 21, 2013||Posted by Staff under Environmental, The Progress Report|
This 2013 excerpt of CNN, Nov 6, is by Karla Cripps.
Large schools of giant Nomura’s jellyfish, which have bodies ranging one to 1.5 meters in diameter, drift into Japanese waters in autumn and damage coastal fisheries. At the beginning of October, a large amount of jellyfish inhabiting a cooling-water intake at a Swedish nuclear plant caused operators to manually shut down production at its largest reactor. In Ireland, a jellyfish bloom reportedly killed thousands of farmed salmon.
This past summer, southern Europe experienced one of its worst jellyfish infestations ever. Experts there have been reporting a steady increase in the number of jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea for years. The situation in the Mediterranean was dire enough to prompt Britain’s foreign office to issue a warning to its citizens vacationing along Europe’s southern coast to watch out for jellyfish.
Many of the world’s deadliest jellyfish are box jellyfish, which refers to the species’ cube-shaped meduae. There are several species of big box jellyfish that have caused many deaths — these include chironex fleckeri in Australia, chironex quadrigatus in Japan and related species in Thailand, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
Also known as the sea wasp and the northern Australian box jellyfish, the chironex fleckeri is possibly the worlds most venomous animal. Its tentacles can reach lengths of up to three meters long, while its bell is about the size of a human head. It can be found throughout the tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific. A close cousin and fellow contender for the “world’s most venomous” cup is the Irukandji, which is the size of a thimble. Good luck scanning the waters for that one before you leap in.
Just the lightest brush — you don’t even feel it — and then, whammo, you’re in more pain than you ever could have imagined, and you are struggling to breathe and you can’t move your limbs and you can’t stop vomiting and your blood pressure just keeps going up and up.
Tourists who avoid an area because of the known risk may alter their plans to hit a “safe” beach whose officials are merely less up front about the jellyfish situation, putting themselves more at risk. A common misconception is that places such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines are free of dangerous jellyfish.
The explosion in jellyfish populations is a visible indicator that life in the oceans is out of balance. So many species are in such low numbers, and habitats are so badly damaged, that restoring them to their original splendor is difficult.
Ed. Notes: Do you care? If so, use every tool in our arsenal. Not just better technologies. Not just better lifestyles. Not just better laws. But also, most importantly, use economic justice. Why? Because people ruin the planet not intentionally but as an untended consequence of making a living. So make making a living easier, less wasteful, and more just. Use geonomics.