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Jellyfish are causing mayhem as pollution, climate change see numbers boom, ABC, RN  By Hong Jiang and Sasha Fegan for Late Night Live 6 Jan 19 Jellyfish have been around for at least 500 million years — they’re older than dinosaurs and even trees.Science writer Juli Berwald calls them “ghosts from the true garden of Eden”.

“An intelligence of a sort has allowed them to make it through the millennia,” she says.

And they’re not going anywhere.

In fact, the brainless, spineless, eyeless, bloodless creatures are booming in numbers — and causing mayhem around the world. Their propensity to breed fast and prolifically means jellyfish can disrupt ocean ecosystems in a flash.

And their effects aren’t contained to the sea.

In places like Sweden, Israel, the US and the Philippines, power plants have been affected by blooms of jellyfish.

“So many jellyfish were swept into the power system … that it shut down the power system through much of this one island in the Philippines,” Ms Berwald says. People thought that perhaps there was a coup going on, but there wasn’t, it was just the jellyfish.”

Jellyfish have also caused plants to shut down in Japan.

“One jellyfish scientist from Japan told me that the first threat to the electric system in Japan is earthquakes, but the second is jellyfish,” Berwald says.

“We are dealing with a ubiquitous creature.”

A human cause

Some scientists think jellyfish numbers are increasing as the climate changes — the creatures reproduce well in warmer waters.

Jellyfish also fare better than many other sea creatures in polluted waters, as they don’t need much oxygen.

Berwald says that can give them the upper hand over predators.

“They can sort of slip into polluted waters, into low oxygen waters, and hide from predation there better than a fish that has a higher oxygen demand,” she says…….. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-06/the-magic-and-mayhem-of-jellyfish/10377112