SEPTEMBER 24, 2019
by Laure Fillon
Jellyfish are breeding at a much higher
rate than before, thanks to changes in their enviroment wrought by human
activity
Thousands of them plague our beaches to the
horror of holidaymakers who dread their sting, but thanks to man's disruption
of the oceans, jellyfish are thriving.
Jellyfish have been on Earth longer than we
have—they are believed to have roamed the oceans for nearly 600 million years.
But human activity, from over-fishing to
plastic waste and climate change, has created an environment in which they are
even more at home.
The proliferation of the jellyfish could
lead to what some observers are calling the "jellyfication" of the
oceans, which are facing profound changes according to a draft UN report due
out on Wednesday.
Fabien Lombard, a French marine biologist
at the Sorbonne University specialising in the ecology of plankton and
jellyfish, would not go that far.
"There are more jellyfish in certain
zones in the world," he told AFP: the Black Sea, off the Namibian coast
and the Sea of Japan.
It is not clear if their presence has
increased in other parts of the world, because it is difficult to actually
count them, although worldwide database was set up in 2014 to track them.
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