New Poisonous Jelly Species Found in Black Sea

From UPI:

The warming waters of the Black Sea have attracted a poisonous species of jellyfish that is spreading along Turkey's coast, scientists said.

The new species has been drawn to the waters because the temperature of the Black Sea is becoming more like the Mediterranean, which, in turn, is becoming more like a tropical sea, said Snezhana Momcheva, a SESAME project coordinator in Bulgaria. SESAME is a European Union-funded study of ecosystems in the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

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Thousands of Jellies Wash Ashore in Hawaii

The invasion has arrived.

About 2,000 jellyfish washed up onto Oahu South Shore beaches on Tuesday morning, a city Ocean Safety and Lifeguard Services Division spokesman said.

The box jellyfish washed up on shores from Waikiki Beach to Ala Moana Beach Park, the city said.

Lifeguards posted warning signs at Waikiki Beach and Ala Moana Beach Park.

Lifeguards treated 174 people with stings, mostly in the Waikiki area. Only one man who was taken to the hospital after he was stung because he had trouble breathing, officials said. He was in stable condition.

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Jellies Gone Wild

Large concentrations of jellies are apparently causing a stir as of late.

Huge swarms of stinging jellyfish and similar slimy animals are ruining beaches in Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, Australia and elsewhere, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.

The report says 150 million people are exposed to jellyfish globally every year, with 500,000 people stung in the Chesapeake Bay, off the U.S. Atlantic Coast, alone.

Another 200,000 are stung every year in Florida, and 10,000 are stung in Australia by the deadly Portuguese man-of-war, according to the report, a broad review of jellyfish research.

The report, available on the Internet at http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/index.jsp, says the Black Sea's fishing and tourism industries have lost $350 million because of a proliferation of comb jelly fish.

The report says more than 1,000 fist-sized comb jellies can be found in a cubic yard (meter) of Black Sea water during a bloom.

They eat the eggs of fish and compete with them for food, wiping out the livelihoods of fishermen, according to the report.

And it says a third of the total weight of all life in California's Monterey Bay is made up of jellyfish.

Human activities that could be making things nice for jellyfish include pollution, climate change, introductions of non-native species, overfishing and building artificial structures such as oil and gas rigs.

New Wonders Found In The Oceans' Depths

From CBS News:

A city of brittle stars off the coast of New Zealand, an Antarctic expressway where octopuses ride along in a flow of extra salty water and a carpet of tiny crustaceans on the Gulf of Mexico sea floor are among the wonders discovered by researchers compiling a massive census of marine life.

"We are still making discoveries," but researchers also are busy assembling data already collected into the big picture of life in the oceans, senior scientist Ron O'Dor said.

The fourth update of the census was released Sunday ahead of a meeting of hundreds of researchers that begins Tuesday in Valencia, Spain. More than 2,000 scientists from 82 nations are taking part in the project, which is to be completed in 2010.

A discovery that delights O'Dor is that many deep-ocean octopuses share an Antarctic origin. As the Antarctic got colder, ice increased and octopuses were forced into deeper water, he said in a telephone interview.

Salt and oxygen are concentrated in the deeper waters, he said. This dense water then flows out, carrying along the octopuses that have adapted to the new conditions, enabling them to spread to deep waters around the world.

Deep-water octopuses worldwide, he pointed out, lack the ink sack that allows their shallow-water cousins to shoot out a camouflage screen.

After all, if they live where it is dark, ink is unnecessary, said O'Dor, a Canadian member of the research team.

Patricia Miloslavich, a senior scientist from Venezuela, is pleased with newly-discovered mollusks, from snails to cuttlefish to squids.

Once the census is complete, the plan is to publish three books: a popular survey of sea life, a second book with chapters for each working group, and a third focusing on biodiversity.

O'Dor said also researchers are working with the online scientific journal PLoS ONE, which is open to anyone and thus would make the results readily available.

Scientists at this week's sessions will hear about the discovery of what the researchers call a brittle star city off the coast of New Zealand.

The brittle stars, animals with five arms, have colonized the peak of a seamount - an underwater mountain - where the current flows past at about 2.5 miles per hour. The current delivers such an ample food supply that thousands of stars can capture food simply by raising their arms.

Researchers found a carpet of small crustaceans inhabiting the head of the Mississippi Canyon in the Gulf of Mexico. There are as many as 12,000 of these small crustaceans per square yard.

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