Eat The Enemy: As Jellyfish Bloom, So Do Appetites Overseas

This story is part of "Eat The Enemy," a HuffPost series on edible invasive species, non-native plants and animals you can help contain from the comfort of your dinner table. Not all invasive species are edible, and some included in this series can be dangerous, including lionfish and wild boar. Please take caution when foraging or hunting for your own food. It's no secret that climate change is a problem for ocean dwellers. Coral reefs are suffering, mollusks are losing their skeletons and fish really don't like it hot. The seas are changing. Yet for one gelatinous creature, the deader the oceans get, the better. Enter the jellyfish: slimy, entrancing, dangerous and prolific. Over the past few decades, a trifecta of human activities has helped the creature's populations boom -- overfishing has removed their natural predators, fertilizer runoff has created low oxygen "dead zones" where they thrive, and acidification has melted the shells of shellfish, but left the jellies unscathed to bob about. Jellyfish blooms have become a major problem around the world far beyond the notorious sting to swimmers. They were responsible for the partial shutdown of a nuclear reactor last year. They've wrought havoc on fisheries around the globe, and they even contributed to the sinking of a 10-ton fishing boat in Japan in 2009. So what are we to do, aside from bend a knee to our new jellyfish overlords? Simple answer: Eat them. Photo: Associated Press One of the most prolific Cnidaria...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news