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New study suggests jellyfish proliferation could discombobulate ocean food chain. Photo courtesy Anna Fiolek, NOAA Central Library.
Balance of ocean food web at risk as jellyfish blooms increase
By Summit Voice
SUMMIT COUNTY — Warmer water temperatures, over-fishing and nutrient loading in coastal areas could result in a jellyfish takeover, according to a team of biologists who studied the role of the slimy floaters in marine ecosystems.
The scenario might be good for a jellyfish lover like the cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants, but as numbers of jellyfish increase, they could tip the balance of ocean food chains away from fish and toward bacteria, the scientists with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science wrote in a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jellyfish eat huge amounts of plankton, which is also the most important food for small fish at the base of ocean food chains. But jellyfish are not a significant food source for other animals and their waste products add almost nothing useful to marine ecosystems.
The research team was led by Rob Condon, now a researcher at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. His research partners included VIMS professors Deborah Steinberg and Deborah Bronk, Paul del Giorgio of the Université du Québec à Montréal, Thierry Bouvier of Université Montpellier in France, Monty Graham of DISL, and Hugh Ducklow of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Condon studied two species of jellyfish in the York River, flowing into Chesapeake Bay, and observed a significant top-down changes to the zooplankton community.
“Blooms of both Mnemiopsis and Chrysaora (along with other members of the Pelagiidae) have been recorded worldwide as causing major problems for marine food webs and human activities (including tourism) … and their increased abundance in … the Baltic Sea and … the Mediterranean … suggests that these jellyfish have considerable invasive capabilities. The inclusion of these jellyfish species in this study is therefore relevant from a global perspective and serves as a relevant model to represent possible jellyfish-mediated changes to coastal bio-geochemical pathways,” the researchers wrote.
In what could become a climate-change bio-feedback loop, the research also suggests that bacteria consuming carbon-rich jellyfish waste and byproducts end up converting the carbon back to another form carbon instead of using to grow or reproduce.
Altogether, the changes could lead to major changes in some marine ecosystems, the researcher concluded.
“Our findings suggest major shifts in microbial structure and function associated with jellyfish blooms, and a large detour of (carbon_ toward bacterial CO2 production and away from higher trophic levels. These results further suggest fundamental transformations in the biogeochemical functioning and biological structure of food webs associated with jellyfish blooms,” they wrote.
Filed under: biodiversity, climate and weather, Environment, global warming, Marine biology Tagged: | Chesapeake Bay, Environment, jellyfish, marine biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Summit County News, Virginia Institute of Marine Science
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Innovative energy underwrites coverage of energy stories.
“The acidification of the oceans is already predicted to have such a corrosive effect that unprotected shellfish will dissolve by the middle of the century.”
Shellfish evolved when CO2 levels were many times today’s level. Most grow more not less with more CO2 since that is a source of the carbon they make their calcium carbonate shells out of. The oceans are not acidic, nor does anybody predict them to become so. They are basic, and the oceans are quite well buffered.
The paper about jellyfish makes no mention of why jellyfish are becoming more abundant, which by the way are a delicacy in Asia. It’s certainly not CO2 since jellyfish breath oxygen not CO2 like plants do and they don’t form carbonate shells either.
The Guardian claims: “Global warming has long been blamed for the huge rise in the world’s jellyfish population.” O.K. now that would be somewhat worth checking on if the oceans were actually warming instead of cooling according to the huge network of thousands of diving ARGO buoys, though that data is no longer published as a global average so I can’t offer a plot to 2011. A decade of cooling oceans: http://co2insanity.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/argo-5a__545x393.jpg
An interesting clue is that the highly pro-AGW biased Wikipedia site has an entry on jellyfish and their blooms but doesn’t even mention Global Warming. The busy bodies over there wouldn’t have missed a good AGW plug if there was a good reference for it.
Let’s dig shall we? First recall that correlation is not causation, and let’s assume warming oceans over longer than a decade, though CO2 being to blame is only found in computer models, not empirical studies.
In 2008 a study implicated AGW in blooms (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079661108000487) but in an interview a co-author claims: “This finding suggests that water temperatures influence jellyfish populations. But we don’t know how and how much.”
Ah, here’s a clue: sardines eat the same food as jellyfish and guess which fish tend to be over fished? These days the big fish are harder to find. Sardine fishing has skyrocketed 100X since the 60s in fact! (http://www.icsu-scope.org/downloadpubs/scope27/images/fig6.1.gif).
So it’s probably hard to tease out a small AGW signal if there is even expected to be one at all and is expected to be positive.
Another alarmist article which implies what there is little actual evidence for, just wishful thinking on the quest to artificially ration energy. Remember how environmentalists reacted to the promise of clean and abundant energy? You don’t? Here’s a reminder.
Cold fusion featured in the LA Times in ’89 before it was debunked. Environmentalists were aghast at the possibility of cheap clean energy:
“It’s like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” – Paul Ehrlich (mentor of John Cook of SkepticalScience.com, author of “Climate Change Denial”)
“Clean-burning, non-polluting, hydrogen-using bulldozers still could knock down trees or build housing developments on farmland.” – Paul Ciotti (LA Times)
“It gives some people the false hope that there are no limits to growth and no environmental price to be paid by having unlimited sources of energy.” – Jeremy Rifkin (NY Times)
“Many people assume that cheaper, more abundant energy will mean that mankind is better off, but there is no evidence for that.” – Laura Nader (sister of Ralph)
-=NikFromNYC=- Ph.D. in Carbon Chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)