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...biologist in the northern Italian town of Lerici in July, marked the first time the species Mnemiopsis leidyi, a thumb-size jellyfish known as the sea walnut, had been documented in the western Mediterranean Sea. Native to the Atlantic coast of the U.S., Mnemiopsis was introduced to the Black Sea in the 1980s - most likely from the ballast water of oil tankers - and played an instrumental role in the collapse of the region's fisheries. "Now the question is, Will it do in the Mediterranean the same thing it did in the Black Sea?" Boero says. "It's harmless...
...reasons for the recent explosion in jellyfish numbers are many. The problems in the Black Sea occurred because Mnemiopsis had been introduced to an ecosystem that had already been severely overfished. In a healthy ecosystem, small fish keep the jellyfish population in check by eating their young. But when the fish population plummets, the tables are turned. By preying on the eggs and larvae of the few surviving fish, the jellyfish prevent them from replenishing their numbers and quickly take their place. "We're shifting from a fish to a jellyfish ocean," says Boero. "We're removing most...
Once a body of water becomes infested with jellyfish, it's not so easy to engineer a recovery. The Black Sea has begun to recuperate, but only after a convergence of several unlikely occurrences: many of the region's fisheries shut down when their stocks fell, the breakup of the Soviet Union sharply cut the amount of fertilizer in the sea, and another alien jellyfish, the Beroe ovata, which preys on the Mnemiopsis, not fish, was accidentally introduced to the water. "It's taken three separate events," Richardson says. "The point is you can't just stop overfishing and expect...
...sure, the Mediterranean's ecosystem is more diverse - and thus more robust - than the Black Sea's. So only time will tell what kind of effect the Mnemiopsis will have. "What these jellyfish are eating are either the young of the next generation or the food of the next generation," says Bella Galil, a scientist at the National Institute of Oceanography in Israel. "We'll know the impact when what they ate does not appear in the nets next year...
Everything from Andrea Bocelli to Aretha Franklin to Bruce Springsteen to the Black Eyed Peas...