All around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly—reproducing in astonishing numbers and congregating where they’ve supposedly never been seen before. Nightmarish accounts of “Jellyfish Gone Wild,”: The sensation of getting stung ranges from a twinge to tingling to savage agony. Victims include Hudson River triathletes, Ironmen in Australia and kite surfers in Costa Rica. In summertime so many jellies mob the waters of the Mediterranean Sea that it can appear to be blistering, and many bathers’ bodies don’t look much different: in 2006, the Spanish Red Cross treated 19,000 stung swimmers along the Costa Brava. Contact with the deadliest type, a box jellyfish native to northern Australian waters, can stop a person’s heart in three minutes. Jellyfish kill between 20 and 40 people a year in the Philippines alone. Nobody knows exactly what’s behind it, but there’s a queasy sense among scientists that jellyfish just might be avengers from the deep, repaying all the insults we’ve heaped on the world’s oceans. Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th... Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea
As the world's oceans are degraded, will they be dominated by jellyfish?
