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| STUNG! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean Lisa-ann Gershwin Sylvia Earle (Fwd.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, May 2013 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-226-02010-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-226-02010-X | 424pp. | HC/FCI | $27.50 | |
The mother ocean1 that Jimmy Buffett sings about really is the mother of all life. The birthplace of life might have been Darwin's "warm little pond" or some claybank or even, per the panspermia concept, somewhere out in space. But today the life we see around us depends upon the sea. Let the phytoplankton in the sea die, and half the planet's oxygen goes with them. While many life forms would survive, the big ones — lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, bears, horses, cows and sheep — would be doomed. So would we, although a smattering of us might make it inside domes with enhanced air supply.
Humans on this planet don't handle creeping crises at all well. We have trouble enough with crashing crises like Katrina. One that sneaks up on us, as climate change or the related problem Lisa-ann Gershwin describes here is doing, comes in under our radar.
It's not as though we've had no warning. Scientists described the relationship between carbon dioxide and infrared radiation over a century ago.2 We now call it "the greenhouse effect." By 1960, the potential problem of global warming had been described on television. President Lyndon Johnson was briefed on it in 1965. In the 1970s, despite myths you might hear, there was no consensus that global cooling was beginning. Dr. Hansen made his presentation to Congress in 1988. Then the opposition began in earnest.
The potential of acidification, caused by rising CO2 concentrations, to drastically change life in the oceans also began to be discussed in the 1960s. It was about the same time that we understood we were thoughtlessly depleting most of our once-plentiful fish stocks — and when jellyfish blooms became a major problem.
The two problems are closely related. Few species of bony fishes prey on jellyfish.3 However, jellyfish eat eggs and larvae of all bony fish species. Thus, you might think that by reducing the numbers of cod and other bony fish we make it harder for jellyfish too. Unfortunately for us, jellyfish can eat just about anything: adult fish (when they can catch them); clams; crabs, starfish; even other jellyfish.
No one was certain where they came from; they might as well have come from the shores of night. They appeared suddenly, without a warning being given, infesting once-pristine seas all over the planet, and shortly had reproduced themselves in great numbers, filling the waters with their gelatinous hordes. They clogged fishermen's nets while consuming the larvae of the fish the fishermen sought. Beaches where the unfortunate inhabitants disported themselves became slime-coated nightmares, and for some few encounters with deadly poisons. At peak seasons, power plants located on the coastlines of this world found the intakes of their cooling systems clogged with millions of the invading creatures. They had to shut down and deploy cleanup crews to haul out multiple tons of crushed bodies. The proudest warships of the world's navies on occasion suffered a similar clogging. And almost everywhere that the intelligent species ruling the planet had established aquatic farms to raise fish for its burgeoning population, the fish were wiped out by the toxins of the invaders, or by their secretions of suffocating mucous. It is not too much to say that the unanticipated overgrowth of these noxious creatures threatened civilization itself. Had some foreign agency introduced them, inadvertently or by design, that agency would surely be regarded as hostile. |
I've couched this in sci-fi terms, and jellyfish do resemble the diabolically designed creatures of SF films. But they are quite real. And despite my title, this could never be a Matt Helm thriller, not because Dean Martin, who played the tongue-in-cheek Bond imitator, is no longer with us, but because no one would pay to see such a slow conquest on the silver screen. Yet pay we will, to stave it off. The longer we wait to act, the higher grows the cost.
It gets worse. Jellyfish also eat the life that supports bony fishes: copepods, invertebrate larvae, other zooplankton. They thus compete directly with bony fish stocks, and when those are depleted by us there is more food for the jellyfish. Once they get established, we may not be able to roll them back.
To make a long and complicated story short, everything we are doing to the oceans makes life easier for jellyfish.
As Lisa Gershwin explains, much remains to be learned about the changes we are making in ocean ecology and how they will affect jellyfish populations. In particular, no one can give a firm timetable to the worst outcome: the sea shifted to a low-energy ecology, devoid of whales, seals, dolphins and the many large fish we know, with half or more of its oxygen-generating capacity gone — and jellyfish ruling the waves. This catastrophe is at least decades in the future.
But just as the effects of global warming are starting to be felt on land, ocean acidification is beginning to turn up in places, and significant drops in numbers of local calciferous life forms are found to result. Since we know that the carbon dioxide and pollutants we produce will continue to exert influence for decades or more, we had best begin to think seriously about continuing business as usual.
To me, the situation looks grim. I'm not sure we are still able, as a species, to undertake that re-thinking. No, I don't think all is lost. But I have only a layman's understanding of the ocean's mysteries. Lisa Gershwin has studied those mysteries for thirty years. I'll leave you to consider her words.
"When I began writing this book, I had the idea that contributing to public understanding of the role jellyfish play in our deteriorating ecosystem would be kind of groovy. I had a naive gut feeling that all was still salvageable and that by really 'getting it,' we would still have time to act. I even thought that we could hand our children a better world, with all the perks we enjoy plus a bit of extra wisdom gleaned along the way." But I think I underestimated how severely we have damaged our oceans and their inhabitants. I now think that we have pushed them too far, past some mysterious tipping point that came and went without fanfare, with no red circle on the calendar and without us knowing the precise moment it all became irreversible. I now believe that it is only a matter of time before the oceans as we know them and need them to be become very different places indeed. No coral reefs teeming with life. No more mighty whales or wobbling penguins. No lobsters or oysters. Sushi without fish. In their place, we shall see blue-green algae, emerald green algae, golden algae, flashing blue algae, red tides, brown tides, and jellyfish. Lots of jellyfish. The seas were dying for us to notice their distress, but we collectively chose to overlook the red flags. Of course, we don't need to listen, we know better; we are Homo sapiens . . . the wise man. – Page 342 |
Consider carefully. The civilization you save may be your own.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.