Rising Ocean Temperatures Create more jellyfish

If you haven't been reading or studying about jellyfish worldwide and you like to have fish in the ocean you should study about what you can do to reduce jellyfish so the oceans still have fish in them 50 years from now.

The Problem: As ocean temperatures rise jellyfish breeding increases naturally. The problem with this is that baby fish are one of the things that jellyfish eat and when you have schools of thousands and thousands of jellyfish all over the world it means that baby fish of almost all species are eaten by jellyfish and don't grow up to be adults. This decimates that populations of most fish species on earth and changes the food chain drastically. Many professional fishermen worldwide try to change this by killing sharks and other predators in the ocean. However, this just reduces the health of the remaining fish. Because predators just (like wolves on land and how the increase the genetic viability of the herds they hunt) predators in the ocean likewise actually increase the genetic viability of fish as well. So the health and genetic viability of the remaining fish actually reduces by not having predators or having many less predators around. No, the real problem at this time in ocean ecology is jellyfish worldwide. The following quote is from the "Smithsonian magazine" special edition July-August 2010.

Begin quote from page 32 "To test the impact of warming oceans on polyp productivity, Widmer assembled a series of incubators and seawater baths. If he heated each a few degrees warmer than the last, what would the jellyfish do? At 39 degrees Fahrenheit, the polyps generated on average about 20 teeny jellyfish. At 46 degrees, roughly 40. The polyps in a 54 degree seawater birthed some 50 jellies and one made 69. 'A new record' widmer says, awed.

To be sure, Widmer has also found that some polyps can't produce young at all if placed in waters significantly warmer than their native range. But his experiments, which confirm research on other jellies done by Purcell, also lend some credence to anxieties that global warming may induce jelly extravaganzas." end quote

Widmer is doing his reasearch at the Monterey Aquarium in California.