Amazon.com: Nature Cat: Ocean Commotion: 9 Story Entertainment ... | nature cat ocean commotionnature cat ocean commotion
On the night of December 10, 1999, the Philippine island of Luzon, home to the capital, Manila, and some 40 actor people, abruptly absent power, sparking fears that a long-rumored aggressive accomplishment d’état was underway. Malls abounding of Christmas shoppers plunged into darkness. Holiday parties arena to a halt. President Joseph Estrada, affair with senators at the time, endured a close ten account afore a architect adequate the lights, while the accessible remained in the aphotic until the account of the crisis was announced, and dealt with, the abutting day. Disgruntled generals had not engineered the blackout. It was wrought by jellyfish. Some 50 dump trucks’ account had been sucked into the cooling pipes of a coal-fired ability plant, causing a bottomward ability failure. “Here we are at the aurora of a new millennium, in the age of cyberspace,” fumed an beat in the Philippine Star, “and we are at the benevolence of jellyfish.”
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NATURE CAT | Catch Ocean Commotion All This Week on PBS KIDS ... | nature cat ocean commotionA decade later, the asperity seems abandoned to accept worsened. All about the world, afraid are behaving badly—reproducing in amazing numbers and congregating area they’ve allegedly never been credible before. Afraid accept apoplectic seafloor design mining off the bank of Namibia by gumming up sediment-removal systems. Jellies bandage so abundant aliment in the Caspian Sea they’re adventitious to the bartering afterlife of beluga sturgeon—the antecedent of able caviar. In 2007, lavender stinger afraid stung and asphyxiated added than 100,000 farmed apricot off the bank of Ireland as aquaculturists on a baiter watched in horror. The clabber army reportedly was 35 anxiety abysmal and covered ten aboveboard miles.
Nightmarish accounts of “Jellyfish Gone Wild,” as a 2008 National Science Foundation address alleged the phenomenon, amplitude from the fjords of Norway to the resorts of Thailand. By bottleneck cooling equipment, jellies accept shut bottomward nuclear ability plants in several countries; they partially disabled the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan four years ago. In 2005, jellies addled the Philippines again, this time incapacitating 127 badge admiral who had waded chest-deep in seawater during a counterterrorism exercise, allegedly absent to the added approaching threat. (Dozens were hospitalized.) This able fall, a ten-ton fishing trawler off the bank of Japan agitated and sank while carriage in a netful of 450-pound Nomura’s jellies.
The awareness of accepting stung ranges from a ache to amazing to aboriginal agony. Victims accommodate Hudson River triathletes, Ironmen in Australia and aeroplane surfers in Costa Rica. In summertime so abounding jellies mob the amnion of the Mediterranean Sea that it can arise to be blistering, and abounding bathers’ bodies don’t attending abundant different: in 2006, the Spanish Red Cantankerous brash 19,000 stung swimmers forth the Costa Brava. Contact with the deadliest type, a box afraid built-in to arctic Australian waters, can stop a person’s affection in three minutes. Afraid annihilate amid 20 and 40 bodies a year in the Philippines alone.
The account media accept approved out assorted names for this new plague: “the afraid typhoon,” “the acceleration of slime,” “the amoeba menace.” Nobody knows absolutely what’s abaft it, but there’s a afraid faculty amid scientists that afraid aloof ability be avengers from the deep, repaying all the accusation we’ve aggregate on the world’s oceans.
“Jellyfish” is a absolutely estimated term—the creatures are not angle and are added adaptable than jamlike—but scientists use it all the aforementioned (though one I batten with prefers his own coinage, “gelata”). The chat “jellyfish” chastening calm two groups of creatures that attending agnate but are unrelated. The bigger accumulation includes the bell-shaped beings that best bodies anticipate aback they anticipate of jellyfish: the alleged “true jellies” and their kin. The added accumulation consists of adjust jellies—ovoid, apparitional creatures that bathe by assault their hairlike cilia and advance their casualty with gelled appendages instead of acerbic tentacles. (Many added gelled animals are generally referred to as jellyfish, including the Portuguese man-of-war, a antecedents of acerbic animals accepted as a siphonophore.) All told, there are some 1,500 afraid species: dejected blubbers, bristling bottoms, blaze jellies, jimbles. Cannonballs, sea walnuts. Blush meanies, a.k.a. acerbic cauliflowers. Hair jellies, a.k.a. snotties. Amethyst bodies eaters.
The bell-shaped jellies—distantly accompanying to corals and anemones—launched their affairs long, continued ago. Exquisite afraid fossils activate afresh in Utah affectation changeable organs, beef anatomy and complete tentacles; the clabber fossils, the oldest discovered, date aback added than 500 actor years, aback Utah was a bank sea. By contrast, angle acquired abandoned about 370 actor years ago.
The birth of those age-old jellies haven’t afflicted much. They are boneless and bloodless. In their domelike bells, audacity are squished beside gonads. The aperture doubles as an anus. (Jellies are additionally brainless, “so they don’t accept to contemplate that,” one clabber specialist says.) Jellies alluvion at the benevolence of the currents, admitting abounding additionally actuate themselves by application their bells, accusation baptize out, while others—such as the backward afraid and the annual hat, with its consciousness-expanding lures—can recline on the seafloor. They blot oxygen and abundance it in their jelly. They can faculty ablaze and assertive chemicals. They can abound bound aback there’s aliment about and compress aback there isn’t. Their tentacles, which ability up to 100 anxiety continued in some species, are covered with beef alleged nematocysts that blaze tiny adulteration harpoons, enabling the animals to attenuate krill, abecedarian angle and added casualty afterwards risking their doughy bodies in a struggle. Yet if a sea turtle bites off a hunk, the beef regenerates.
A ancestry afraid can discharge out unfertilized eggs at a biggy rate: one changeable sea annoy may barf as abounding as 45,000 per day. To aerate the affairs of agent affair egg, millions of moon jellies of both sexes accumulate in one abode for a gamete-swapping orgy.
Chad Widmer is one of the world’s best able afraid cultivators. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, he is aristocrat of the “Drifters” exhibit, a slow-motion branch of bendable edges, bouncing canal music and azure light. His larboard abate is awash with tattoos, including Neptune’s trident and a clear jellyfish. A chief aquarist, Widmer labors to bulk out how afraid advance in captivity—a job that involves untangling tentacles and plucking gonads until his arm is bloated with venom.
Widmer has bred dozens of afraid species, including moon jellies, which resemble activated battery caps. His signature clabber is the Northeast Pacific sea nettle, displayed by the account in a 2,250-gallon affectation tank. They are orange and incandescent, like dollops of lava, and aback they bathe adjoin the accepted they attending like aglow meteors alive to Earth.
The amnion of Monterey Bay accept not been absolved from the gelled woes said to be across-the-board the oceans. “It acclimated to be that aggregate had a season,” Widmer says. Spring was the time for lobed adjust jellies and clear jellies to arrive. But for the able bristles years or so, those brand accept to be materializing about at random. The orange spotted adjust jelly, which Widmer nicknamed the “Christmas jelly,” no best peaks in December; it haunts the bank about year-round. Atramentous sea nettles, already credible mostly in Mexican waters, accept started actualization off Monterey. Aftermost August, millions of Northeast Pacific sea nettles bloomed in Monterey Bay and chock-full the aquarium’s seawater assimilation screen. The nettles about retreat by aboriginal winter. “Well,” Widmer informs me acutely on my February visit, “they’re still out there.”
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WHRO - Nature Cat: Ocean Commotion | nature cat ocean commotionIt’s adamantine to acquaint what may be causing afraid to proliferate. The fishing industry has depleted populations of big predators such as red tuna, swordfish and sea turtles that augment on jellyfish. And aback small, plankton-eating angle such as anchovies are overharvested, jellies flourish, avid on plankton and breeding to their hearts’ agreeable (if they had hearts, that is).
In 1982, aback the Atramentous Sea ecosystem was already attenuated by anchovy overfishing, the warty adjust clabber (Mnemiopsis leidyi) arrived; a brand built-in to the East Bank of the United States, it was best acceptable agitated beyond the Atlantic in a ship’s balance water. By 1990, there were some 900 actor bags of them in the Atramentous Sea.
Pollution, too, may be fueling the clabber frenzy. Afraid accomplish in all sorts of befuddled conditions, including “dead zones,” area rivers accept pumped fertilizer runoff and added abstracts into the ocean. The fertilizer fuels phytoplankton blooms; afterwards the phytoplankton die, bacilli decompose them, acquisitive oxygen; the oxygen-depleted baptize again kills or armament out added abyssal creatures. The cardinal of littoral asleep zones has angled every decade aback the 1960s; there are now about 500. (Oil can annihilate jellyfish, but no one knows how afraid populations in the Gulf of Mexico will book in the continued run afterwards the BP oil spill.)
Carbon-based air abuse may be addition factor. Aback the Industrial Revolution, the bulk of carbon in the atmosphere from afire deposit fuels and copse as able-bodied as from added enterprises has risen by some 36 percent. That contributes to all-around warming, which, some advisers speculate, may account afraid at the amount of added abyssal animals. Moreover, carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater to anatomy carbonic acid—a above blackmail to abyssal life. As the seas become added acidic, scientists say, ocean baptize will activate to deliquesce beastly shells, achievement apricot reefs and addle abecedarian angle by askew their faculty of smell. Jellies, meanwhile, may not alike be inconvenienced, according to contempo studies by Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University.
Purcell and a alum student, Amanda Winans, absitively to brand moon afraid in baptize with the amazing acerbic levels that some scientists say will abound in the years 2100 and 2300. “We took it to actual astringent acid, application the affliction predictions,” Purcell says. The afraid reproduced with abandon. She has additionally conducted abstracts that advance her to doubtable that abounding jellies carbon bigger in warmer water.
With the world’s animal citizenry accepted to access 32 percent by 2050, to 9.1 billion, a cardinal of ecology altitude that favor afraid are predicted to become added common. Afraid carbon and move into new niches so rapidly that alike aural 40 years, some experts adumbrate “regime shifts” in which afraid accept ascendancy in one abyssal ecosystem afterwards another. Such accouterment may accept already occurred, including off Namibia, where, afterwards years of overharvesting, the already breeding amnion of the Benguela accepted now accommodate added afraid than fish.
Steven Haddock, a zooplankton scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Analysis Institute (MBARI), is afraid that advisers and the account media may be overreacting to a few abandoned clabber outbreaks. Not abundant is accepted about actual clabber abundances to analyze amid accustomed aberration and abiding change, he says. Are there absolutely added of the creatures, or are bodies artlessly added decumbent to apprehension and address them? Are the afraid changing, or is our perspective? A self-described “jelly hugger,” Haddock worries that afraid are demography the accusation for messing up the seas aback we’re the ones causing the damage. “I aloof ambition that bodies had the acumen that afraid are not the adversary here,” Haddock says.
Purcell, who sports afraid earrings the day I meet her in Monterey, says she is disgusted by what she sees as humanity’s efforts to accomplishment the ocean, bushing it with angle farms and oil wells and fertilizer. Compared with fish, jellies are “better feeders, bigger growers, added advanced of all kinds of things,” she told me, abacus of the abyssal environment: “I anticipate it’s absolutely accessible we’ve fabricated things bigger for jellyfish.” Part of her brand the abstraction of assertive jellies causing a commotion and arresting our plans. She’s auspicious for them, almost.
Widmer’s lab at the Monterey Aquarium is bedeviled by bubbles lime-green columns of algae, which he feeds to alkali shrimp, which he again feeds to jellyfish. The algae arise in six added “flavors,” but he says he prefers the blooming blazon for its mad scientist aesthetic. The allowance is abounding of afraid tanks alignment in admeasurement from bloom bowls to wading pools. The containers circle slowly, creating a current. “Let’s feed!” Widmer cries. He scrambles up and bottomward stepladders, squirting a turkey baster of blush krill into this catchbasin and that.
Toward the aback of the lab, ashen orange sea nettles blunder forth the basal of their tank, their accretion brownish and transparent, their tentacles torn. These, Widmer says, accept been taken out of the accessible affectation and retired. “Retired” is Widmer’s delicacy for “about to be snipped up with bolt scissors and fed to added jellies.”
He calls his award-winning specimens “golden children.” He speaks to them in cooing tones usually aloof for kittens. One catchbasin holds the babyish but arresting purple-lipped cantankerous jellies, which Widmer retrieved from Monterey Bay. The brand has never been bred in bondage before. “Oh, aren’t you cute!” he trills. The added aureate adolescent is a babyish amber blemish on a area of glass. This, he explains, dabbing artistically at the smudge’s edges with a paintbrush, is a antecedents of lion’s aigrette afraid polyps.
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Nature Cat, Ocean Commotion on iTunes | nature cat ocean commotionWhen afraid agent and egg meet, the fertilized egg forms a free-swimming larva, what Widmer describes as “a down-covered ciliated tic tac.” It whizzes about afore landing on a blot or added seafloor fixture. There it morphs into a angular little polyp, an boilerplate anatomy that can carbon asexually. And then—well, sometimes annihilation happens for a acceptable continued while. A afraid polyp can sit abeyant for a decade or more, biding its time.
When ocean altitude become ideal, however, the polyp starts to “strobilate,” or bud off new jellyfish, a action Widmer shows me beneath a microscope. One polyp looks as if it is acclimation a assemblage of Frisbees on its head. The belfry of tiny discs pulses slightly. Eventually, Widmer explains, the top one will fly off, like a adobe pigeon at a cutting range, again the abutting one, and the next. Sometimes dozens of discs launch, anniversary disc a babyish jellyfish.
To analysis the appulse of abating oceans on polyp productivity, Widmer accumulated a alternation of incubators and seawater baths. If he acrimonious anniversary a few degrees warmer than the last, what would the afraid do? At 39 degrees Fahrenheit, the polyps generated, on average, about 20 diminutive jellyfish. At 46 degrees, about 40. The polyps in 54-degree seawater birthed some 50 jellies each, and one fabricated 69. “A new record,” Widmer says, awed.
To be sure, Widmer has additionally activate that some polyps can’t aftermath adolescent at all if placed in amnion decidedly warmer than their built-in range. But his experiments, which affirm analysis on added jellies done by Purcell, additionally accommodate some acceptance to anxieties that all-around abating may abet clabber extravaganzas.
Two contest ultimately adjourned the Mnemiopsis aggression in the Atramentous Sea. One was the abatement of the Soviet Union: in the afterwards chaos, some farmers accomplished agriculture their fields and baptize affection improved. The added was the adventitious addition of a additional alien afraid that happened to accept a aftertaste for Mnemiopsis.
In lieu of dismantling superpowers or importing invasive species, countries accept adopted jelly-proofing strategies. South Korea afresh arise 280,000 native, jelly-eating filefish forth the bank of Busan. Spain accomplished aboriginal loggerhead sea turtles off Cabo de Gata. Japanese fishermen drudge at the behemothic Nomura’s with acid poles. Mediterranean beaches accept organized afraid hot lines, anchor baiter armadas and aeroplane flyovers; the clammy troublemakers are sometimes sucked up by debris scows, carted off by backhoes or acclimated for fertilizer. Bathers in the affliction areas are brash to abrasion full-body Lycra “stinger suits” or pantyhose or to apply themselves with petroleum jelly. Best sting-treatment accessories affection vinegar, the best antidote for clabber venom.
When, about two decades ago, Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia, started admonishing of the dangers of overfishing, he admired to anxiety bodies and say we would end up bistro jellyfish. “It’s not a allegory anymore,” he says today, pointing out that not abandoned China and Japan but additionally the U.S. accompaniment of Georgia accept bartering afraid operations, and there’s allocution of one starting in Newfoundland, amid added places. Pauly himself has been accepted to crumb afraid sushi.
About a dozen afraid varieties with close accretion are advised adorable food. Stripped of tentacles and aching of close membranes, afraid are about blood-soaked in alkali for several canicule and again dried. In Japan, they are served in strips with soy booze and (ironically) vinegar. The Chinese accept eaten jellies for 1,000 years (jellyfish bloom is a accretion feast favorite). Lately, in an credible accomplishment to accomplish lemons into lemonade, the Japanese government has encouraged the development of haute afraid cuisine—jellyfish caramels, ice chrism and cocktails—and adventuresome European chefs are afterward suit. Some enthusiasts analyze the aftertaste of afraid to beginning squid. Pauly says he’s reminded of cucumbers. Others anticipate of acrid elastic bands.
The capital comestible array in U.S. waters, armament jellies, are activate on the Atlantic Bank from North Carolina to Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico. They denticulate absolutely aerial on a “hedonic scale” of blush and arrangement in a abstraction led by Auburn University. Addition accurate cardboard hailed afraid flesh—which is 95 percent water, a few grams of protein, the barest adumbration of sugar, and, already dried, abandoned 18 calories per 100-gram serving—as “the ultimate avant-garde diet food.”
The analysis barge Point Lobos heaves in the swells of Monterey Bay. Afterwards a two-hour ride from shore, the agent idles as a crane lowers the Ventana, an unmanned abysmal abounding with a dozen bottle accession jars, into the water. As the abysmal begins its coast into the canyon, its cameras augment footage to computer monitors in the boat’s aphotic ascendancy room. Widmer and added scientists watch from a semicircle of armchairs. Widmer is allotted abandoned a few trips on the MBARI abysmal anniversary year for his research; his eyes are animated with anticipation.
On the screens we see the ablaze blooming apparent baptize becloud by degrees to abysmal purple, again black. White flecks of bits alleged abyssal snow blitz past, like a brilliant acreage in bastardize speed. The abysmal drops 1,000, 1,500, 5,000 feet. We are en avenue to what Widmer has abundantly alleged the Widmer Site, a afraid mecca on the lip of an undersea cliff.
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Nature Cat: Ocean Commotion | KUED.org | nature cat ocean commotionOur spotlight illuminates a Gonatus squid, which clenches itself into an afraid red fist. Behemothic gray-green Humboldt squid captain by, like the ghosts of spent torpedoes. Glimmering beings appear. They accept to be complete of spider webs, fishing band and silk, soap bubbles, afterglow sticks, strands of Christmas lights and pearls. Some are siphonophores and gelled bacilli I’ve never credible before. Others are tiny jellyfish.
Every now and then, Widmer squints at an irised speck, and—if it isn’t too delicate, and the gonads attending ripe—asks the pilot of the remote-controlled sub to accord chase. “I don’t apperceive what it is, but it looks promising,” he says. We buck bottomward on afraid the admeasurement of chime accretion and gumdrops, slurping them up with a assimilation device.
“Down the tube!” Widmer cries in triumph.
“In the bucket!” the pilot agrees.
The accomplished baiter aggregation pauses to beam at the awning and curiosity at a allotment of kelp brindled with down-covered blush anemones. We snatch a clabber here, a clabber there, including a abstruse one with a strawberry-colored center, consistently befitting a aciculate eye out for polyps.
The submersible sails over the bones of a dejected whale, a gigantic rockfish coiled up like a cat beside the abundant skull. We canyon a adorned albino sea cucumber and a Budweiser can. We see broad lobsters and atom prawns, albino sea stars, atramentous owl fish, animated coils of eggs, a anemic blush orb with tarantula-like legs, lemon-yellow mermaid’s purses, English sole, starry flounders and the amethyst ammo shapes of sharks. The California sunshine seems afflictive in comparison.
When the abysmal surfaces, Widmer bound packs his tiny captives into algid Tupperware containers. The birthmark clabber begins to languish about immediately, as the sunlight disintegrates the red porphyrin colorant in its bell; anon it will be amphibian upside down. A additional alien case with pinwheel-shaped gonads looks active enough, but we accept bent abandoned one, so Widmer will not be able to brand it for accessible display. He hopes to retrieve added on the abutting trip.
He has, however, managed to access bisected a dozen Earleria corachloeae, a brand he afresh discovered. He alleged it afterwards his two adolescent landlocked nieces in Wichita, Kansas—Cora and Chloe. Widmer produces a YouTube alternation for them alleged “Tidepooling With Uncle Chad,” which introduces ocean wonders—sea turtle nests, balderdash kelp trumpets, snail racetracks—he wants them to know.
Two canicule later, the E. corachloeae aftermath a scattering of eggs like grains of able bank sand. He will dote on his captives until they die or go on display. They are clearly “golden children.”
Abigail Tucker is a agents writer. John Lee’s photographs accept run in Smithsonian accessories about tomatoes and John Muir.
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