The jellyfish are coming

Kiss your salmon goodbye.  Jellyfish are now 86% of the life in Puget Sound, a sign of things gone badly wrong.  Nutrient soup from your poop, Noctiluca blooms (red-orange streaks in the water) and the fish start disappearing.

Note:  proper scientific caution dictates weaselly caution words like perhaps and maybe should be in this post, so consider them to be here.

(See p. 27 of link for the 86% finding)

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Puget Sound in trouble?

I just saw a very scary presentation.  Scary, that is, for oceanography wonks.

It looks like Puget Sound is changing in ways that people won't like.  Fewer fish, lower oxygen, more jellyfish.  Thanks to nutrients from sewage treatment plants and some surprising food web changes.

You'll know you're seeing it happen if the waters light up, bioluminescence from Noctiluca blooms, as in the funky YouTube video of waving a stick in water at night.  I know I do this all the time, don't you?

If you're interested in some hard-core oceanography that explains the hypothesis, check out this presentation.  Wow, I wondered why I've been seeing so many big jellyfish in the Sound on my twice-daily sampling cruises (ferry commutes).

For now, I'm going to go cry in my beer over the lost fish of Puget Sound.

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