Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Overfishing leads to jellyfish boom in Black Sea

Now that jellyfish can be up to 90% of the animal life in the Black Sea, it's worth asking why? Did the bad jellyfish kill off all the nice fish?

A new study says overfishing is to blame, by removing the fish and letting jellyfish take over the ecosystem.

"Initially, the jellyfish was blamed for the fish stock collapse," said Georgi Daskalov, from the UK's Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas). Now they believe that overfishing was the reason for the jellyfish boom.

This is not the first example of overfishing leading to jellyfish booms. Looks like Jeremy Jackson was right when he predicted the rise of slime.

4 comments:

Up Welng said...

given my line of work i'm all for cnidarians, but this is nuts... again, i detect a canary tweeting out it's last breath... when does all of this constitute an ominous pattern for our policy makers?

Mark Powell said...

Jellyfish blooms should make everyone take notice, I agree. Sadly, it seems that a collapse of money fish is necessary to get the attention of managers. But note the first reaction, blaming those darn jellyfish for killing the fish.

Anonymous said...

the link is broken

Mark Powell said...

Link fixed, sorry about that. Thanks for letting me know.