AP: Gigantic jellies wreck Japanese fishery; BBC: Corals discovered eating jelly fish.
Two very different snippets of jellyfish news hit the last few days.
The larger one seems particularly sound. AP‘s Michael Casey filed it from Japan after a visit with a fishing crew. His enterprising story aptly applies the appliance measuring stick. Its lede: “A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venemous tentacles…” and so, creepily, on. One is uncertain that blood-orange is a color, and orange is itself a metaphor, but there are blood oranges. A terminological tangle, that is.
Back on topic: The story gains heft as it moves past its vignette lede, introducing readers to a scientist who has devoted much of his career to trying to understand the recent proliferation of these huge jellies, their impact on the fishery, and blips of data from around the world that suggest a global surge in jellyfish populations with warming one overarching common factor. The piece does not however proclaim a single cause for the case in Japan, but cites temperature’s rise, overfishing, and pollution that triggers plankton growth as possible co-factors. Nice balanced job – despite the usual and exasperatingly, often ignorant, carping and wisecracks one finds in, as one example, The Arizona Star‘s list of readers’ comments. One continues to think newspapers and other outlets ought toss out any comment that does not include the commenter’s full real name (exceptions for those in totalitarian nations voicing dissent that could put them in jail, or worse.) This paper appears to require partial names and initials. That’s a start.
On the weird news about jellyfish front, one finds diversion at BBC. There Jody Bourton reports, with the video evidence, discovery that some coral polyps are able to eat jellyfish. None of the gelatinous victims appear to be of refrigerator size but that, too, is a start. Maybe Gaea will somehow bail us out of a jellyfish-dominated oceanic future.
- Charlie Petit
