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<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Five-year
Chinese study suggests that human activity made gelatinous outbreaks worse.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:#222222;letter-spacing:-.4pt'>Coastal havoc boosts jellies</span></b><b><span
style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#222222;
letter-spacing:-.4pt'><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=vcard><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif"'><a
href="http://www.nature.com/news/coastal-havoc-boosts-jellies-1.16236?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20141030#auth-1"><span
style='color:#5C7996;border:none windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0in'>Jane Qiu</span></a></span></span><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Nature
514, 545 doi:10.1038/514545a<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>29
October 2014<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
text-transform:uppercase'>QINGDAO<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:17.85pt;background:#ECECEC'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> “It was
a truly gelatinous world,” says marine ecologist Sun Song, recalling a
jellyfish outbreak last year in the Yellow Sea off China’s eastern coast.
“The slimy monsters were everywhere, their long tentacles fluttering
ferociously in the rolling waves.” Such blooms have repeatedly choked
Chinese waters in the past decade, posing substantial threats to tourism,
fisheries and coastal facilities such as chemical plants and nuclear power
stations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Jellyfish
blooms have probably struck the world’s seas periodically for hundreds of
millions of years. But researchers suspect that human activity has made them
worse, with knock-on effects on marine ecosystems and especially on fish,
because jellyfish compete with fish for food and feed on their larvae. Now, one
of the largest studies of jellyfish blooms so far — involving laboratory
testing, ocean surveys and field experiments — has found direct evidence
linking the proliferation of jellyfish to human disturbances along the coast,
especially the disruption of sea-floor ecosystems.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The five-year,
US$4.5-million initiative started work in 2010 led by Sun, who is director of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oceanology in the coastal
city of Qingdao. Sun’s team, involving eight institutions and more than
100 researchers, presented its latest results earlier this month at the World
Conference on Marine Biodiversity, also in Qingdao. China’s waters are
not the only ones to have had jellyfish outbreaks in recent years, so the
results “could help to tackle similar problems in other parts of the
world” such as the Mediterranean or the Caspian Sea, says Mark Costello,
a marine ecologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The survey
shows that Chinese coasts are plagued primarily by three jellyfish species:<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><i>Aurelia aurita</i>,<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><i>Cyanea nozaki</i><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>and the most damaging one, the giant<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><i>Nemopilema nomurai</i>, which can
grow to 2 metres in diameter and weigh as much as 200 kilograms.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Jellyfish are
most recognizable in the short-lived ‘medusa’ stage of their life
cycles, when they swim freely and reproduce sexually. But they also go through
a stage in which they are bound to the sea floor as ‘polyps’. These
can live for years and reproduce asexually, budding new medusae. Most research
so far has focused on the medusa stage, but “the key to jellyfish
outbreaks may lie in the polyps”, says Sun.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Polyps are
notoriously difficult to find and collect: they are transparent and easy to
break, and can be just micrometres long. “Numerous attempts by scuba
diving, underwater robots and dredging up the sediments have led to
nothing,” Sun says. So the team turned to the jellyfish in the
oceanology institute’s aquarium. The researchers grew polyps on hard
surfaces such as glass, plastic or stone in the laboratory and then lowered the
slabs onto the seabed at half a dozen coastal locations, to see if specific
environmental factors would spur a mini-outbreak.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>As Sun reported
at the conference, polyps of all three species tended to sprout medusae when
sea-bottom temperatures were about 10–15</span><span style='font-family:
"Cambria Math","serif"'> </span><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>°C.
The blooms were greatly enhanced by extreme temperature swings. Moreover, more
medusae formed in waters that had fewer bottom dwellers, or
‘benthos’ — animals such as starfish, sea slugs, shrimp and
fish — and greater environmental disturbance. Nutrient overloads from
sewage and agricultural run-off, and construction of infrastructure such as ports
and bridges, seemed to help the jellyfish to thrive.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The findings
point to a link between the gelatinous scourges and coastal disturbances in
China caused by overfishing, bottom trawling and oxygen depletion following
algal blooms, as well as coastal development and increasingly frequent
extreme-weather events, says Costello. Moreover, a decline in both the number
and the diversity of benthos in the past 50 years may have also
contributed, says Xu Kuidong, a marine ecologist at the Institute of
Oceanology. Benthos that feed on polyps “are the key biological control
of jellyfish populations”, he says.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The ocean
currents that skirt China’s coast can affect benthos by changing
temperatures and nutrient concentrations, so a broader approach will be
necessary to unveil the true causes of jellyfish outbreaks, says Sun. In April,
he and his colleagues launched a five-year, $165-million project to study ocean
currents. By measuring the motion of currents at depths of up to
6,000 metres, and learning how ecosystems respond, the researchers hope to
piece together how local and regional factors combine to cause blooms.
“This might allow us to forecast — and even prevent — a
forthcoming outbreak,” says Sun.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>And in May, an
international collaboration launched the Jellyfish Database Initiative (JeDI),
which will provide global, open-access data on jellyfish abundances and
associated environmental factors. Such projects — as well as
more-detailed studies of polyps — will attempt to improve understanding
of outbreaks and the contribution of natural variations and human factors to
changes in jelly populations around the world, says Cathy Lucas, a marine
biologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who contributes to JeDI.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Sun says that
increasing rates of jellyfish outbreaks in Chinese waters might be an indicator
of worsening ecosystem health. Over the past 500 million years, the
creatures have survived countless climatic and environmental upheavals —
including all five known mass-extinction events, he points out. “When
ecosystems deteriorate, they are likely to thrive when others fail.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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