Jellyfish conquering the world: Weekly Web Review in Toxicology

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyCigZ_bsTM Having just returned from vacation and from the 2013 North American Congress on Clinical Toxicology in Atlanta — where I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with such toxicology social media luminaries as @PharmERToxGuy, @DavidJuurlink, @Jldorazio, and @toxic_tweets. Because I’ve been away, I have some catching up to do, and this installment will cover not just toxicology on the web over the last week, but the last month. Jellyfish well on their way to world domination: In his New York Review of Books piece on Lisa-ann Gershwin’s Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, Tim Flannery reports that the impact of jellyfish blooms are increasing in exponential fashion, with terrifying implications. The sheer mass of jellyfish populations already have crippled nuclear battleships, shut down nuclear power plants, destroyed complex ecosystems that have been stable for millenia, and caused electricity blackouts in substantial parts of large nations. The factors contributing to the explosion of jellyfish have not been completely determined, but may include a combination of global warming, acidification of oceans, and overfishing of natural jellyfish predators. Jellyfish are ancient and highly adaptable, especially in their reproductive capacity: Hermaphroditism. Cloning. External fertilization. Self fertilization. Courtship and copulation. Fission. Fusion. Cannibalism. You name it, jellyfish [are] doin...
Source: The Poison Review - Category: Toxicology Authors: Tags: Medical arsenic box jellyfish irukandji isa-ann gershwin pma stung! thallium tianle li Source Type: news