Jellyfish takeover questioned
On a luckless fishing trip George Monbiot fears "the beginning of the end of vertebrate ecology":
A combination of overfishing and ocean acidification (caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has creating the perfect conditions for this shift from a system dominated by fish to a system dominated by jellyfish.Don't worry George, jellyfish aren't taking over the oceans just yet:
In the last decade, gelatinous blobs have reportedly clogged up water treatment and power plants, overrun fish farms, and hampered fishermen around the world. They even forced the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan out of the Port of Brisbane in 2006.
But claims they will dominate our oceans are not supported by data, says Winthrop Professor Carlos Duarte director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.
posted by Anonymous at 9:24 AM |
2 Comments:
To be fair to Monbiot, there is a more detailed report citing several researchers in Nature, which talks about how hard it is to be scientifically sure of what is happening to jellyfish populations world wide. They aren't the easiest things to track and study.
Some researchers seem to think there probably is a significant increase happening, just they can't really prove it yet.
The explanation as to why there should be an increase perhaps has more to do with overfishing, too.
Anyway:
http://www.nature.com/news/marine-ecology-attack-of-the-blobs-1.9929
I won't pretend to know anything about jellyfish populations, but I think that Moonbat - being a hysterical carbon cringing sky is falling jellyfish himself - is simply projecting.
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