RISE OF THE
JELLYFISH
Aussie jellyfish are one of the few animals that will continue to thrive as temperatures rise, and experts say it’s going to cause some problems.
The nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Ronald Reagan was hailed as a masterpiece of naval architecture, able to withstand everything and anything… except a bloom of jellyfish. In 2006, while in the Port of Brisbane, thousands of jellyfish clogged the carrier’s condensers – like plastic stuck in a pool filter – forcing those on board to evacuate. For CSIRO jellyfish expert Lisa-ann Gershwin, the whole catastrophe had a lot of “smirkability” about it. “In Australia, there have been crazier blooms. But the fact that this was the world's newest, most expensive and fearsome super carrier, and of course it was American, made it all the funnier, and it got a lot of attention.” 36
Lisa-ann has been working around jellyfish for most of her adult life after becoming fascinated by them at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, in her home state of California. Studying marine biology at Berkeley, she quickly focused her studies on jellyfish, eventually becoming the world’s foremost expert on the identification and classification of the infamously deadly species, irukandji. When she arrived in Australia in 1998 on a Fulbright scholarship to study jellyfish blooms, she was bombarded by the Australian medical community, who were eager to better understand these deadly jellyfish and how their excruciating sting could be treated.
In 2003, she made the permanent move to Australia and has been sounding the alarm on their “blooming bad behaviour” ever since. Jellyfish blooms provide a mesmerising scene. Packed in like sardines, groups of these colourful bulbous blobs can stretch for hundreds of kilometres, and it’s been happening for hundreds of millions of years. “There’s a fossilised quarry in central Wisconsin, so it’s landlocked. To put it into perspective, the area is similar to Alice Springs. Here, in the middle of nowhere, there are seven consecutive bedding plains of fossilised jellyfish blooms on top of each other, just like library books. Blooming is a natural part of their life cycle,” says Lisa-ann. But now, human activity is starting to make these blooms more common, and on a larger scale. “We catch fish, discard waste and put stuff into the air, and this is taking a toll on coastal ecosystems. Species are either winners or losers, and jellyfish are quite often the winners: they grow fast and breed more in these disturbed conditions.”
