The jellyfish are coming

View 789 Friday, September 13, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

 

It’s late and time for our walk, but if you want something to think about try this:

Jerry, amid all the Syria hoo-hah, I found this piece in the New York Review of Books to be among the most worrisome things I’ve read in quite some time.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?pagination=false

Say what you will about the open questions around AGW, but it’s a certainty that we’ve been collecting a tremendous amount of fish from the oceans for a long time now.

It sounds like we may not enjoy some outcomes of that at all.

Jon

—

Jonathan Abbey

It’s pretty scary   More later today.

But then we have this:

 

jellyfish

I was almost taken in by the fascinating story until the end where the CAGW stuff came in. The oceans are 30% more acidic now than 30 years ago? I don’t think so. Then I looked at the author of the review – Tim Flannery, mammologist and paid catastrophic climate change advisor to the previous Australian Government (we just changed the diaper there). Tim gets A$180,000 per year(US$165,000), roughly, to spend 3 days a week spreading his message of gloom and doom, rising sea levels and temperatures, drought etc. while investing in government subsidized geothermal and other alternative energy schemes, having recently bought waterfront property near Sydney. He could probably make a good living selling used cars as he did well selling the vastly overpriced, now mothballed, desalination plants that several state governments built in response to his predictions of endless drought.

The book appears to be the usual "I need more funding to study this problem" plea from an academic scientist. A quick look at her website http://lisagershwin.com/ doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence as she appears to tend towards the moonbat end of the environmental scientist spectrum.

Mike Borgelt

Thank you. I confess I was hoping it was something like that. I have gone looking for more, in particular that Black Sea disaster.  I found

http://whyfiles.org/055oddball/fish.html which suggests that that part of the threat is pretty real.

 

REVIEW OF JELLYFISH BLOOMS IN

THE MEDITERRANEAN AND BLACK SEA  a report from the UN FAO in Rome http://www.fao.org/docrep/017/i3169e/i3169e.pdf also takes the threat seriously but not with the same breathless tone as the Australian document.  The UN Document suggests that “Citizen Science” – amateur naturalist systematic observations – would be useful and encourages more data gathering.  As to the Black Sea:

The ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi (Fig. 11) was first detected in the Black Sea in 1982 (Peredalov, 1983). This species is typical of the Atlantic coast of the USA, and was probably brought to the Black Sea as a clandestine passenger in the ballast waters of US oil tankers. The Black Sea has several native gelatinous plankters but, evidently, they coevolved with their prey and predators and they never caused serious problems. Mnemiopsis , instead, built huge populations and put the Black Sea fisheries on their knees, depleting the nekton by feeding on fish eggs and larvae (direct predation) and on their crustacean prey (competition), as reported, for instance, by Kydeis (1994) and Shiganova (1997). For the first time, it was undeniable that fisheries can be severely affected by gelatinous plankton (besides the clogging of fishing nets during episodic blooms).

The problem was almost solved by another ctenophore invader, Beroeovata , presumably coming from the same Atlantic ecosystem where Mnemiopsis thrives (Finenko et al. , 2000). Beroe feeds on Mnemiopsis and its arrival in the Black Sea mitigated the impact of the alien, just as it probably does in the original ecosystem of both species (Shiganova et al. , 2004). For the first time, with the case of Mnemiopsis, it became clear that the predation and competition of gelatinous zooplankton can have an overwhelming impact on fish population sand, hence, on fisheries.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, and especially along the USA coasts, plankton ecologists had been showing that gelatinous plankters do feed on fish eggs and larvae and proposed estimates for their impact on fish populations (e.g. Purcell, 1985). But these claims apparently passed unnoticed by fisheries ecologists, who continued to envisage man as the sole cause of decrease of fish populations.

Between the extreme of zero impact allotted to gelatinous plankton by traditional fisheries ecologists and the total impact allotted to Mnemiopsis there is probably some intermediate measure.

An NSF document on the Black Sea also says that introduction of predators into that body of water has greatly ameliorated the problem, and

Swarming from coast to coast, Mnemiopsis crowded out almost all fish in the Black Sea. The result: losses of hundreds of millions of dollars to the area’s fishing and tourism industries.

The tide only turned on Mnemiopsis in 1997, when another invading species of comb jelly, called Beroe, arrived in the Black Sea, probably also via ballast water from the U.S. Because Beroe eats Mnemiopsis, it has helped tame the Black Sea’s Mnemiopsis monster.

Moreover, because Beroe eats nothing but Mnemiopsis and disappears as Mnemiopsis disappears, it has improved its adopted habitat without causing ecological problems–a rarity for an introduced species.

Nevertheless, Mnemiopsis remains a serious problem. Why? Because even though Mnemiopsis is controlled in the Black Sea through Beroe-assisted jellycide, it still greatly impacts area ecology. Additionally, Mnemiopsis has fanned out from the Black Sea via canals and ships to the Caspian, Azov and Mediterranean Seas. Also, additional waves of U.S.-based Mnemiopsis have recently invaded the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.

Just as it did in the Black Sea, Mnemiopsis has significantly reduced fish catches in many of these other huge seas. Indeed, Mnemiopsis has caused even more damage to fisheries in the Caspian Sea than it did in the Black Sea.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/textonly/locations_blacksea.jsp

In other words, yet another problem. although not the most serious one facing mankind.  And another instance of my view that if you have a lot of wealth it’s a lot easier to face new disasters; if you bankrupt yourself trying to solve one particular problem you may find yourself swamped by another and have no recourses to use on that one’s solution.  Of course that’s just common sense prudence, but this seems more rare now than when I was younger.

I don’t know if it’s an effect of the affordable health care act or something else, but I find that my copayment for an MRI has more than doubled since the last time my oncologist decided he wanted another look at the inside of my head. That will be in about two weeks. I have no reason to believe my brain cancer is returning, but they want to be sure. Apparently I’m pretty healthy.  Of course he increased costs mean I’ll have to say a few words about subscribing or renewing subscriptions to this place, but I expect that can wait until the next time KUSC does a new pledge drive.

The good news of the day is that they are talking about way to prevent the US bombardment of Syria, and everyone sounds hopeful.  Just imagine. We’re working hard on finding a way to prevent ourselves from killing Syrians and breaking Syrian things in order to punish Syrians for using chemical weapons on Syrians.

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism — a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.

By Gay Talese

http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_

My attention was called to this in a writers discussion about journalism, and I vaguely remembered. Then I found that in one place it tells a story of Frank Sinatra and Harlan Ellison.  I’ll have to ask Harlan about it next time we talk.