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Polluting Paradise The Invasion of the Jellyfish
Not here. Not now. Well, not exactly. Worldwide, it’s been a great summer for jellyfish, which come in a surprising number of sizes, shapes, and degrees of toxicity. But it’s not been such a good summer for swimmers. Thousands of vacationers fled the unusually warm beaches of Italy and Spain this summer because of jellyfish stings. Here, in the Cape Fear area, both Carolina Beach and Wrightsville Beach have reported multiple encounters with stinging nettles. “We’re now getting closer to a dozen calls a week as opposed to the eight or nine an hour we were having,” David Baker, director of Ocean Rescue, is quoted as saying in the August 24-30 issue of Lumina News. A sensational article in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that oceanic lifeforms are reverting to the planet’s primordial past has been widely reproduced online. (Might some of the jellyfish blooms be at least partly because the jellyfish are feeding on storm water-produced nitrogen and phosphorous not normally found at a healthy shoreline?) In the LA Times article—and in many other reports by journalists or scientists that I found when I “swam with the jellyfish” online—pollution, global warming and over fishing were linked again and again with the jellyfish invasions. Try your own quick journey if you want to swim with the jellyfish (and investigate what the August 31, 2006 issue of Nature describes as “Sick Seas”) at the same time. Type in “jellyfish pollution” or “jellyfish bacteria,” or “jellyfish sewage” for example. Among the things you will learn is that blue-green algae, which are really slimy strands of illness-inducing bacteria, are not organisms that you want to encounter in the water. They sometimes live in the same water as jellyfish, and both seem to be proliferating. You might also learn that there is a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River that is twice the size of Texas, or that there is a humungous “Garbage Patch” in the Pacific Ocean. (The ocean hasn’t yet figured out how to recycle plastic.) If you continue your cyber-travel, you will discover that jellyfish are six hundred million years old, that many countries and communities who encounter them in increasing density tend to blame them on yet another country or community (for Japan it’s the rapidly developing China) and that at least some fishermen in Asia have given up fishing for fish and switched to fishing for jellyfish. (Some jellyfish in Asian waters, I discovered, can be HUGE. I also learned that it takes a fair amount of effort to prepare jellyfish, which, dried, can be crunchy in a salad, but have relatively little food value.) Trying to eliminate jellyfish on site has been tried and does not seem to work. What kills the jellyfish kills other, more desirable sealife as well. Seagoing turtles are their natural enemy; they are also animals that need considerably more world-wide protection. Getting caught in fishermen’s nets is one major hazard for them; eating plastic or fishing filament that they mistake for jellyfish is another. Some communities almost appear to have resigned themselves to living with jellyfish as a recurring presence. Check out the Chesapeake Bay online, for example. I read that the jellyfish are given credit for eating some of the Bay’s valued oyster’s predators. Time out for a yearly jellyfish invasion seems to be becoming a Chesapeake Bay rite of summer. For those who want to stay in the water and preserve pristine beaches, some drastic strategies seem to offer themselves. Prevent development from polluting ocean waters? Stop playing North Carolina roulette with the hog farms’ “lagoons,” cesspools that can spill over into our waterways in the event of very heavy rain brought by a hurricane or two - or even possibly a very wet tropical storm? Manage storm water or sewage as efficiently—and, alas, probably expensively, as possible? Actually change our lifestyles? Drive, smaller, more energy-efficient cars? Build (gasp!) smaller houses? Let the rain water our lawns, and avoid fertilizing them in counter-productive ways? Let grass look like grass instead of a golf course? The list can be a long one. While we hesitate, jellyfish are likely to keep coming back—but definitely not like a song. What are we willing to do about them? Will next summer offer us yet another extended opportunity to swim with uninvited stinging nettles?
Maggie Parish is a retired Professor of English at UNC Wilmington and a regular contributor to CCV.
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Carolina Civic Voice Fall 2006 Vol. 6, No 3 |
