"My kids," Pauly said, "will tell their children: Eat your jellyfish."

[bloom]

A Primeval Tide of Toxins

Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This 'rise of slime,' as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.

By Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer

July 30, 2006

<snip>
Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.

O'Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar with these ancient life forms, but had never seen this particular kind before. What was it doing in Moreton Bay? Why was it so toxic? Why was it growing so fast?

The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime."
<more>

http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,799834.story?coll=ktla-news-1

________________________________

This is the most comprehensive article I've seen on the subject. It's part of a week-long series on oceans ->


Today

Mankind is returning the seas to a time when algae and jellyfish ruled.

Monday

Toxic algae are attacking the brains of sea lions and other marine mammals.

Tuesday

Red tides grow more virulent and sicken people on land.

Wednesday

Torrents of plastic junk foul the most remote parts of the ocean.

Thursday

The seas are turning acidic, eroding the building blocks of ocean life.

[bloom]

1. more info links

http://scripps.ucsd.eduhttp://cmbc.ucsd.edu/

http://www.hboi.edu/

http://www.initrogen.org/

http://www.seaaroundus.org

http://www.millenniumassessment.org

http://www.epa.gov/owow/estuaries/guidance/

[DrRang]

6. "The Swarm" by German author Frank Schatzing is an international best

seller. I'd never heard of it in the U.S. until I bought it in the Dallas airport. Basically a long 2004 science "fiction" novel about the same subject--the seas are rebelling against humanity trashing them, starting with swarms of toxic jellyfish turning up in places where they aren't supposed to be, methane hydrate-eating worms collapsing the North Sea continental slope, etc. I'm about a third through it and recommend it.

[bloom]

10. I hadn't heard of it either.

Thanks for the tip.

[tridim]

2. And the likely "conservative" response..

Like global warming, it's not our fault so we're not going to do anything about it.

[shadowknows69]

3. Maybe Gaia is moving us back to the primordial ooze

She probably wants to shake off the parasites on her skin(us)and start over. Here's hoping the dolphins run things next time.

[patdem]

8. Funny you said that....I had something to say similar years ago

an opening line from a poem I wrote...simple, I know..but hey...20 years ago..

From the ooze of the primordial sea
came food & gold & values & me.

The atmosphere was thick with elements rare,
but the feeling of life was in the air.

this is the last three stanzas...similar to the gaia recall

And for its possession we're willing to destroy all,
but wait, perhaps the ooze has had a recall.

For as the atmosphere grows thick with elements rare
and life struggles in diminishing air.

The setting’s created for green paper's success
and since money can talk it'll tell you the rest.

[bloom]

9. "perhaps the ooze has had a recall"

It sort of makes you wonder - starting over - how things might evolve differently. Not that we would ever know.

[shadowknows69]

11. Luckily I believe in reincarnation

and I'm probably not at Nirvana yet so I'm looking forward to the future. I'd rather not have to come back as a primordial amoeba but if that's all that's left, what can you do?

[bloom]

12. There are some really interesting looking ones

- jellyfish types. (Some of the slime is not so nice - but to the slime it must be alright).





I suppose they are as happy as anything.

[pooja]

4. We are seeing the beginings of mass extinction.

[bloom]

5. In some places - jellyfish already are "what's for dinner"

"That's the smell of money," Simpson said, all smiles at the haul. "Jellyballs are thick today. Seven cents a pound. Yes, sir, we're making money."

Simpson would never eat a jellyfish. But shrimp have grown scarce in these waters after decades of intensive trawling. So during the winter months when jellyfish swarm, he makes his living catching what he used to consider a messy nuisance clogging his nets.

It's simple math. He can spend a week at sea scraping the ocean bottom for shrimp and be lucky to pocket $600 after paying for fuel, food, wages for crew and the boat owner's cut.

Or, in a few hours of trawling for jellyfish, he can fill up the hold, be back in port the same day and clear twice as much. The jellyfish are processed at the dock in Darien, Ga., and exported to China and Japan, where spicy jellyfish salad and soup are delicacies.

"Easy money," Simpson said. "They get so thick you can walk on them."

...

Federal scientists tallied a tenfold increase in jellies in the Bering Sea in the 1990s. They were so thick off the Alaskan Peninsula that fishermen nicknamed it the Slime Bank. Researchers have found teeming swarms of jellyfish off Georges Bank in New England and the coast of Namibia, in the fiords of Norway and in the Gulf of Mexico. Also proliferating is the giant nomurai found off Japan, a jellyfish the size of a washing machine.

[soothsayer]

7. peanut butter and jellyfish sammitches---yum!