JellyFish taking over the world

[Fiskadoro]

There's a huge omission in that article that's worth mentioning.
It never talks about the role of the global economy and global shipping.

Ships around the world take on bilge water for ballast depending on how much cargo they are carrying. Larger ships take on as much as 20+ million gallons, but most of the big ships you see out there carry about three million gallons. That's a lot of seawater, and when they pump in that seawater they also pump in the local larval forms of marine life, that they then pump out somewhere else when they take on new cargo.

Since trips are long not all of it survives but some organisms like Jellyfish clams, and other inebriates or even bacteria can get transported by the millions to regions and oceans where they have never existed before, where they have no checks and balances or natural predators to control them.

The worst instance I've heard of relates to the Atlantic Comb jellyfish which was transported by bilge water from our East Coast to the Black Sea. There they fed on young crustacean and fish larva in zooplankton, and with no natural predators they bred in such large numbers that they completely destroyed several fisheries.

Imagine if some obscure Indonesian Jellyfish got established here and killed off our entire lobster population, or Australian Box jellyfish (the most venomous creatures in the sea) moved into our waters and started killing local swimmers and divers. Just incredibly not cool.

If you think that's far fetched or science fiction you'd be wrong. This stuff is already here.

Scientists believe that quite possibly the majority of red tide globally is caused by invasive microorganisms that have been transported by bilge water into regions they never lived in before. Infections of Cholera in the US have been attributed to bilge water from other countries like Brazil.

In San Francisco Scientists now estimate that up to 90% of the biomass (living things) in the water in that Bay are invasive species from other places on the globe brought in by bilge water.

Of course shipping is a huge business and it's hard to regulate the discharge of hundreds of millions of gallons of bilge water taken from all over the world and dropped in any given port on a given day, but if you want to know where the environmental imbalance that's causing these jellyfish explosions is coming from look at shipping because that's the most likely culprit in my opinion.