The Jellies

The Jellies

    This topic is a little off the beaten path but it came about the night before last as friends discussed what they thought the year ahead might bring, from shifting majorities of peoples to changes in general.  And for some reason, the talk shifted to a sense of fragility, of how quickly life can also change, how one's health can shift to a critical point that suddenly places it beyond the realm of modern medicine.  Cancer, of course, comes to mind (although it didn't come up that night), the subject of a review of The Death of Cancer by Vincent T. DeVita, Jr., as told by Malcolm Gladwell to The New Yorker.  Says the review: “The Death of Cancer” is an angry book, in which one of the critical figures in twentieth-century oncology unloads a lifetime of frustration with the obduracy and closed-mindedness of his profession.  DeVita concludes, “There are incredibly promising therapies out there.  If used to their fullest potential for all patients, I believe we could cure an additional 100,000 patients a year.”  He is not the first to point out the shortcomings of clinical practice, of course.  What sets “The Death of Cancer” apart is what he proposes to do about it.  Basically, it boils down to his belief that the freedom of doctors to experiment, to try new combinations of drugs (many of DeVita's trials were successful, and many were thwarted by bureaucratic and hospital rules, resulting --in DeVita's words-- many unnecessary deaths) is the path to new discoveries.  But as Gladwell adds: Here we have a paradox.  The breakthroughs made at the N.C.I. (National Cancer Institute) in the nineteen-sixties and seventies were the product of a freewheeling intellectual climate. But that same freewheeling climate is what made it possible for the stubborn doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering to concoct their non-cure.  The social conditions that birthed a new idea in one place impeded the spread of that same idea in another.  People who push for greater innovation in the marketplace often naïvely assume that what is good for the innovator is also, down the line, good for the diffusion of their ideas.  And people worried about diffusion often position themselves as the friends of innovation, as if a system that does well at spreading good ideas necessarily makes it easier to come up with good ideas.  The implication of “The Death of Cancer” is, on the contrary, that innovation and diffusion can sometimes conflict.

    Our discussion, as mentioned, brought none of this up.  But the subject of too much sugar in our diets came up, something that is resulting in liver problems that sometimes mimic that of an alcoholic (even in children); some of this was proving irreversible, despite the liver being considered the human body's most forgiving and most self-repairing organ, given the chance.  But even this discussion was soon passed over and it was on to life as it is now, especially since we were all in the process of finishing a rich Amaretto-filled Italian cream dessert.  Which brings me all the way back to another subject that was never discussed, that of a recent article from Smithsonian titled The New King of the Sea by Abigail Tucker.  It's several years old, the piece, which is probably a good thing because, well, things have gotten worse.  But this opening will start you out: On the night of December 10, 1999, the Philippine island of Luzon, home to the capital, Manila, and some 40 million people, abruptly lost power, sparking fears that a long-rumored military coup d’état was underway.  Malls full of Christmas shoppers plunged into darkness.  Holiday parties ground to a halt.  President Joseph Estrada, meeting with senators at the time, endured a tense ten minutes before a generator restored the lights, while the public remained in the dark until the cause of the crisis was announced, and dealt with, the next day.  Disgruntled generals had not engineered the blackout.  It was wrought by jellyfish.  Some 50 dump trucks’ worth had been sucked into the cooling pipes of a coal-fired power plant, causing a cascading power failure.  “Here we are at the dawn of a new millennium, in the age of cyberspace,” fumed an editorial in the Philippine Star, “and we are at the mercy of jellyfish.”...A decade later, the predicament seems only to have worsened.  All around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly—reproducing in astonishing numbers and congregating where they’ve supposedly never been seen before.  Jellyfish have halted seafloor diamond mining off the coast of Namibia by gumming up sediment-removal systems.  Jellies scarf so much food in the Caspian Sea they’re contributing to the commercial extinction of beluga sturgeon—the source of fine caviar. In 2007, mauve stinger jellyfish stung and asphyxiated more than 100,000 farmed salmon off the coast of Ireland as aquaculturists on a boat watched in horror.  The jelly swarm reportedly was 35 feet deep and covered ten square miles...Nightmarish accounts of “Jellyfish Gone Wild,” as a 2008 National Science Foundation report called the phenomenon, stretch from the fjords of Norway to the resorts of Thailand. By clogging cooling equipment, jellies have shut down nuclear power plants in several countries; they partially disabled the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan four years ago.

    This, of course, was written back in 2010, now six years ago.  And the jellies are continuing their changing of the ocean landscape, for they are one of the few ocean species that welcome our pollution and our acidification and our de-oxygenation of the waters.  Bring it on, they seem to be saying, their 1500 species (none of which are really "fish") have been here far longer than most, some 500 million years (yes, 150 million years before fish), and can reproduce like crazy (according to the article, each jellyfish can send out as many as 45,000 eggs daily), given the right conditions...and it would appear that despite good intentions at the Paris Climate Talks, we humans are indeed giving them the "right" conditions.  We've taken away most of their predators (and are rapidly removing the few species that are left); we've created "dead zones" in the oceans due to our excessive fertilizer runoffs, which result in huge algae blooms which take out the oxygen which decimates the marine population (but perfect for jellyfish).  All of which led author Gwynn Guilford to write a piece for Quartz a few years ago, along with some photos to drive home the point.
   

Photo by Reuters: Awashimaura Fisheries Association Coop

 

 

    Jellyfish are actually quite difficult to destroy.  Some species, if cut up, simply produce more jellyfish from the parts.  Another piece in Quartz said this: Jelly polyps can live for years, and can clone themselves.  One polyp can produce hundreds of clones, and each clone can produce hundreds of jellies..And that nightmare scenario is just the start.  Shredded jellyfish tentacles can still sting, and once they’ve been diced by the JEROS (an experimental jellyfish-shredding robot), they’ll pass right through the nets designed to protect swimming areas.   Chopped up jellyfish goop can also threaten nuclear power plants just as effectively as whole jellies.  Plus, these robots will essentially fill the seas with mulch made out of jelly biomass, which will fall to the seafloor and could smother whatever was trying to make a living down there.  

    Graduate student at Brown University, Rebecca Helm, has a different take of what might not be "invasive swarms" of jellyfish, but rather the fact that we are simply starting to notice them more often, all of which appears on her JellyBiologist blog.  Here's just one of her comments: Human/jelly relations are so complicated, what we find annoying may be perfectly normal for them.  People often blame an increase in the number of jelly as a reason for concern, but I like to counter that there has been a huge increase in the number of *people* as well, and perhaps in many places there weren’t people to appreciate the large numbers of jellies before.  For me, harvesting jellies only makes sense in areas where we know for sure they’ve increased.  And especially when we know that increase is due to people.  In other places we should proceed with more caution. 

    This idea of "harvesting" jellies is not new, and has been proposed not only for fertilizing crops but also to supply a changing world diet.  Low in both sugar and calories (and unfortunately, protein) the water-filled jellies (only certain varieties are edible) have been a delicacy in China for thousands of years, and now chefs in both Japan and Europe are catching on.  There's even a harvesting operation in the state of Georgia in the U.S. (yes, the jellyfish have arrived in the Gulf), as told in an article in Modern Farmer titled, Jellyfish, It's What's for Dinner.   The wholesale price of jellyfish in 2014?...$0.07 per pound. 

    Invasive or not, you can get stung by jellyfish, sometimes fatally.  As docile and passive as these sea creatures might seem, a good rule of thumb is to not mess with them.  Still, now that we're starting to see them more often, it might just open our eyes once again to realize just how little we know about something we once considered so simple.  Floating with the ocean currents, these quiet populations of all sizes (for some varieties of jellies can weigh more than 400 pounds) might just be becoming common enough to make it into our modern diets, as mentioned in an article titled The Delicious, Invasive Species You'll Be Eating Next in Bloomberg Businessweek.  Come breakfast time a few years from now, you might just want to cast an extra glance upward when asked, "Would you care for some jelly with your bread?"