Word: jellyfish
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...somehow be salvaged. The city joined local activists to zero in on the Gowanus Canal, hoping it could become the anchor for a neighborhood renewal. Several developers announced plans to construct new apartments; Whole Foods, a harbinger of upward mobility, purchased a nearby parcel. In recent years, sightings of jellyfish, cormorants, bass and even a harp seal were celebrated as signs that the canal had a bright future. Some adventurous souls, seeking to highlight the canal's potential, even started a canoeing club. (See the top 10 animal stories...
...center of a human-Na'vi battle. The story had been knocking around in Cameron's brain since the 1970s, when, while driving a truck for Southern California's Brea Olinda Unified School District, he began to paint some fanciful scenes that would linger in his mind: flying jellyfish, wood sprites (which he called "dandelion things"), blazingly colorful bioluminescent forests, fan lizards and big-eyed cats. (Read an interview with Avatar director James Cameron...
Climate change, too, is likely playing a role. As ocean temperatures rise, jellyfish are reproducing faster, and tropical species are beginning to extend their range. "It could be a big economic problem for countries like Australia," says Anthony Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. If the deadly box jellyfish that plague the country's northern beaches migrate south to the Gold Coast, it could have huge implications for the region's multibillion-dollar tourism industry. (See TIME's special report on the environment...
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...