Are Mother Nature's 15 Minutes Really Over?

I was aghast to encounter this snippet in a thought-provoking "Art in America" article about environmentally conscious artist Mary Miss, who has striven for decades to challenge viewers to look beyond the landscape or landmark they think they see at first glance.

The NSF is the National Science Foundation.

The grant for Miss’s “Broadway” hub was the first artist-initiated project to be supported by the NSF. The award suggests how far afield scientists feel they need to reach at a time when public interest in environmental issues (and many forms of biological research) is diminishing at an alarming rate.

This prompts questions. Chief among them is whether it's true. Is there really declining interest in environmental issues? This is an art publication we're talking about, and the next several sentences are indeed filled with left-wing rage against the conservative machine.

And if so, is this blowback from the blink of an eye that English-language media has granted to climate warming, greenhouse gases, ocean acidification, the Plastics Problem, and myriad other exigencies that no one seems interested in any longer? Have people really experienced a surfeit of frequently toothless headlines, links, and TV spots about the descent into ecocide?

Say it ain't so. Or say it is. It really makes no difference to most people, I suppose.

But the following excerpt from the concluding paragraph comforted me, for some reason:

As with any kind of activist art, the difficulty is engaging the unconvinced—or, even harder, the uninterested. Miss, who approaches that challenge armed above all with an unerring formal sense, says she favors informing over advocating. Like most worthy art, her projects make viewers both more alert and more self-conscious. During a lecture at the IMA, she referred to the famous Borges parable of a map the size of the territory it charts; FLOW, she noted, is similarly a point-by-point, real-size mapping of a water system. She also cited something said to her by one of her scientific collaborators: “All property is riverfront property—the river starts at your front door.”

Video: Rescuing Baby Humpback, And Boy Is He Excited

[I just realized that I'd not reposted this entry from my previous blog. But it's too heart-warming to leave behind, so I'm reposting it here and now. Plus, vowing to get blogging again.]

I just came across great video posted by Gershon Cohen of fellow Great Whale Conservancy (Earth Island Institute) founder Michael Fishbach and friends saving a juvenile Humpback Whale caught in a drift net this past winter in the Gulf of California/Sea of Cortez.

It's an abject lesson in the perils of even the most local of fishing practices, if it's carried out recklessly. That's no more than a few kilograms of monofilament webbing bringing down an animal that weighs tens of tons and is among the largest that's ever inhabited the earth.

Bravo to Cohen and Fishbach, and to others like them.

Star-struck

From a delightful photo gallery of sea stars I just came across, one image in particular that struck me was the sight of a Sun Star grasping at and feeding off of the carcass of a penguin.

Those mollusks nearby must have breathed a serious sigh of relief.

'Rare' Fin Whale Grouping Off U.K. Coast

The BBC reports that scientists off the Cornish coast of southwest England were awed by the sight of 21 Fin Whales lunge-feeding together.

In the photo above (taken by La Jolla's Southwest Fisheries Science Center), you can see the telltale markings that distinguish the Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus) from the Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus): the animal's white lower-right jaw and the light chevron behind its head.

Fin Whales aren't the type to hang out in stable groups, according to what I've read of them, so this was likely to be an unassociated aggregation that was chasing krill or other smallish schooling fish. The scientists who spotted them were counting sardines at the time, according to BBC. One of them called it an "incredibly rare event."

Seeing so many of the world's second-largest creatures in one spot would be more exciting, however, if it weren't another possible sign of a distressing development:

Dr Colin MacLeod, Marinelife's chief scientific adviser, said the sighting could be part of a wider movement of sea creatures around Britain's coast as a result of climate change.

"These changes indicate the extent to which climate change is affecting our marine animals.

"If it is affecting these top predators to such an extent, it is likely that it is also affecting other marine life further down the food chain, including species which are commercially important for the fishing industry," he said.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?

Bad news for one of the Western Hemisphere's best marine conservation success stories, Cabo Pulmo in the Gulf of California, says "National Geographic."

In the comments, the article's author, Enrico Sala, says he and a colleague have a paper due out soon that's full of the "hard data" tracking sea life in Cabo Pulmo between 1999 and 2009.

I didn't see any links to online petition efforts to convince Mexican authorities to abandon plans to sell off this coastline to the hotel industry, though.

Wish I Were Here

Lots of divers will have nothing to do with the small stuff; it's sharks and mantas and such that gets their blood racing. But there's something to be said for those dives that provide big thrills in small packages.

Marine biologist Richard Mooi is enjoying such an excursion, and he's sharing the experience on the "Scientist at Work" blog:

We are focusing our shallow-water survey on the Verde Island Passage, a marine region felt to be the “center of the center” of Indo-Pacific marine biodiversity. The passage is already home to more documented species than any other marine habitat on earth, and its diverse list of species grows by the day. For example, we are just short of 800 species of sea slugs alone (of which a large proportion are new to science). I am astonished by the number of sea urchin species, which reached 37 just today. Although that figure is not as grandiose as other tallies, even in this small region I have seen more echinoderm species than ever before. I learned today from the Philippine scientists working with us here in Mabini that they found more than 50 species of reef-building corals in a single dive just this morning.

Mermaid Jumps Shark

The trailer is out for a film called "Great White Shark: Beyond the Cage of Fear."

There's nothing wrong with a cast of Chippendale's divers (and one "mermaid") trying to "destroy the myth of a mindless killing machine," mind you. But I can't stop laughing over the filmmaker's zany and misguided conceit: dressing a grown woman as a fish (OK, half-fish) so she can briefly get into the frame with a Great White and thus prove that "a shark knows the difference between Us and Dinner." But this picture doesn't tell a thousand words. In fact, it's just too unintentionally ridiculous for words.

Talk about "jumping the shark."

If the 3-meter Great White in that shot turns on that Daryl Hannah look-alike, does it disprove the hypothesis? Then again, how could it, because SHE'S DRESSED AS A FISH!? And if it doesn't, does that confirm the hypothesis -- or simply prove that sharks prefer beefcakes to blondes?

Not So Anomalous After All

It turns out that a hefty Cambrian predator that looked a bit like a cross between a sting ray and a prawn was bigger and hardier than anyone realized. It was widely thought that the anomalocaridids had been successfully displaced by the nautiloids around 510 million years ago. Not true, it now seems.

Dinosaur-tie-donning Yale paleontologist and taphonomist Derek Briggs, who along with colleague Peter Van Roy authored the new report on the basis of fossils found in Morocco, says anomalocaridid had already "become a kind of icon of the 'Cambrian explosion' because it's the largest predator amongst those animals that appeared when all the major groups of Metazoans first appear on the fossil record." But it was also poorly understood for a long time. He notes in this brief film that various parts of the anomalocaridid were initially thought to be separate animals -- the dual barbed appendages in front of the mouth, and the mouth/jaw that looks like the shuttered aperture of a camera. We knew a lot more about them before the Morocco discovery, including that they were probably ravenous predators of soft-bodied organisms like worms and such.

Briggs says the Moroccan revelation is twofold: a) these anomalocarodids were "enormous" at well over 1 meter long; and b) they demonstrate that anomalocaridid or its relatives "persisted" well beyond when the rock record previously suggested, so at least 30 million years beyond the middle Cambrian around 510 million years ago.

"Nature" explains more about these "super-predators" and the Moroccan revelation with regard to their continued survival:

[A]nomalocaridids came in diverse shapes and sizes — from Hurdia victoria, with its triangular carapace, to Schinderhannes bartelsi, with its long, pointed tail — and lived in the areas that are now Europe, the United States, Australia and China. But ancient relatives of sea scorpions and nautiluses that emerged in the Ordovician Period (490 million–440 million years ago) were suspected to have out-competed the anomalocaridids, causing them to die out, says Van Roy.

In 2008, however, an amateur collector, Mohammed Ben Said Ben Moula, discovered specimens that looked like anomalocaridids, Van Roy says. But it wasn't until 2009, when the researchers took a trip to the Fezouata rock formation in southeast Morocco, that they realized just what Ben Moula had discovered.

"National Geographic" has more about their size and evolutionary milieu:

Previous anomalocaridid fossils had shown the animals grew to perhaps 2 feet (0.6 meter) long, which already would have made them the largest animals of the Cambrian period (542 to 501 million years ago)—an evolutionarily explosive time, when invertebrate life evolved into many new varieties, such as sea lilies and worms.

But at a foot longer than previous specimens, the largest of the new anomalocaridids suggests the segmented animals grew to bigger sizes than scientists had imagined.

So while its evolutionary line eventually died out, anomalocaridid was thriving for a lot longer than anyone was giving it credit for.

Ground Control To Major Bobtail

On its historic final journey, the space shuttle "Endeavour" has taken a freckled little Bobtail Squid (Euprymna scolopes) where no squid has gone before. (Photo by Nick Hobgood from Wikipedia Commons)

The idea is to study the response to life in space by a bacteria that part of the squid's natural payload. Will it go all "Deep Blue Sea" on experimenters, like Salmonella did, or at least get altered, like E. coli did?

"New Scientist" explains:

...Jamie Foster of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who is running the experiment, puts it: "Do good bacteria go bad?"

Foster has arranged to send up the bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes, a Pacific species that carries a cargo of bacteria called Vibrio fischeri in its body. The microbes colonise young squid soon after the squid hatch and set up home in their light organs. The squid use the bacteria to generate light, which they shine downwards to ensure they don't cast a visible shadow.

Unbeknownst to the cephalonaut, it's being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice for science:

Foster's experiment is simple. Newly hatched squid that have not yet encountered their bacterial partners will go up to orbit in tubes of seawater. 14 hours after launch, an astronaut will add the bacteria and give them 28 hours to colonise the squid. Then the squid will be killed and fixed solid, and brought back to Earth for examination.

It's just the latest way in which cephalopods are helping unravel the mysteries of life, a topic to which I'll surely return in a future post.

Video: Ice Diver Inspires

"National Geographic" photographer and polar-ice enthusiast Paul Nicklen, who has shared his wild story of an encounter with a seemingly nurturing Leopard Seal in the past, talks more about his passionate love for the Arctic and its inhabitants, as well as polar ice's crucial part in the web of life.

He's an engaging host with an invaluable message in this recent TED talk.

Odds And Ends

Ever wonder how Humpback Whales mate? Scientists do. But now witnesses have actually seen two of these winged giants in flagranti. And there are photos to prove it. (Thanks, Underwater Times).

The highlight, the "Narooma News" explains about this landmark bit of lovin', is not the voyeurism of a second bull spectating but rather the mating couple's preferred position:

What Jon witnessed is called a “heat run”, where as many as 40 humpback males chase down a female, and vie for the right to mate with her.

After the female chooses her mate, they usually swim off, and until now, humpbacks mating had never been witnessed, let alone recorded, he said.

The mating took place in a relatively shallow lagoon where he was able to get less than 10 metres from them, fixated by both the mating pair and a huge male located just underneath them.

He said that all the researchers who saw his images were surprised how the whales mated side by side and continued swimming, rather than belly-to-belly as traditionally was thought how it happened.

Bonny Schumaker blogged about Sea Shepherd and friends discovering encouraging signs of life in the Gulf of Mexico over Labor Day weekend, including 21 Whale Shark sightings in all:

We spotted 12 whale sharks on Sunday. Again, they were always near or in the middle of a school of jumping tuna and lots of baitfish. Some of those bait balls had tiger sharks with them; we never did see both tiger and whale sharks together. And of course we also were delighted to find more leatherback turtles and dolphins.

There was also this little behavioral gem:

We witnessed five dolphins apparently playing with the sub-adult whale shark -- they seemed to be taking turns chasing each other. The dolphins, if not the young whale shark, appeared to be having quite some fun with it all; the scientists were quite excited about this, as it is yet another feature of whale shark behavior about which we know very little.

I haven't tracked down the purported "Whale Shark finning" video itself, but maybe that's just as well. I wonder whether the shark's fin properties that are so highly coveted in parts of Asia are even present in Whale Sharks.

A Six-Gill Shark is caught chomping a fish head on video nearly a mile down. Can the six-gill's bite be so innocuous, or is that a titanium fish head?

A music video inspired by sea life that's just a joy to watch.

Offline For A Little While

I'm offline for a while. Little diving expected, I'm afraid.

My nonfiction reading list includes: Rachel Carson's "The Sea Around Us," Tony Koslow's "The Silent Deep," Philip Hoare's "The Whale" and Jared Diamond's "Collapse," among others.

Marine Miscellany

Alvin lives, we are reminded by Scientist at Work; and the Generation-X research submersible is still doing great work. This time, it's for an expedition to Hydrate Ridge to study carbonate rock, deep-sea ecology, protozoans called foraminifera (whatever that is), and other inscrutibles. Okay, it is showing its age sometimes.

Alvin's bio courtesy of Jeffrey Marlow:

The most important member of the expedition, however, is the 35,000-pound, egg-shaped submersible named Alvin. Alvin has been the workhorse of the deep-ocean scientific community for more than 45 years, allowing us to explore unseen worlds thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean. To sweeten the deal, Alvin comes equipped with robotic arms and an array of sample boxes, so we can collect promising samples and continue our investigations in the relative comfort of a laboratory. Faded photographs and dusty plaques commemorating the sub’s prolific history adorn the walls of Atlantis’s library. Alvin helped recover an unexploded hydrogen bomb in 1966, took Walter Cronkite to hydrothermal vents in 1982 and explored the Titanic in 1986. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. In 1967, an ambitious swordfish attacked Alvin’s foam outer layer, got stuck and was eventually cooked for dinner by the crew. A couple of years later, the sub sank during deployment and spent 10 months on the seafloor before it could be resurrected.

Aw, shucks. Chinese and U.S. scientists at BGI-Shenzhen claim to have tracked down the oyster genome. And it looks like this could lead to a genetically engineered oyster that comes out of the water on the half-shell.

Scat-terbrained scientists (that's a pun, not an insult) are still on the hunt for the elusive feces of the Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus). If you think the feces are tough, by the way, you should try capturing their urine.

More evidence that beachside resorts and hotels aren't taking the threat to hatchling sea turtles seriously. (hat tip: DotEarth)

Oceanographer John Delaney delivered a recent TED talk in which he stumped for "new eyes" (that's a Proust quote) in the ocean through the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). Should man really "be present throughout the ocean at will," as Delaney describes it? My mind's not made up.

The Talking Head Said...

I'm a big David Byrne fan. Big. Like in, everything he's ever done has fascinated, entertained, and usually educated me somehow. (I've lived for nearly two decades in the Czech Republic, and, still, his visit to an eastern Czech city's dilapidated ironworks taught me reams of stuff about the place.)

So when he casually mentioned on his omnibus blog that on the heels of a trip to Stromboli -- the actively volcanic island near Sicily, not the villainous puppeteer who threatens to make firewood out of "Pinocchio" -- he'd relaxed to the "Planet Earth: Deep Oceans" episode, it put me in the mood to do the same. There is some great footage, particularly the sailfish hunt.

But in case you've seen the Planet Earth series already, here's another great video:

Hooked Marlin Takes It Out On The Photographers

A massive marlin showed sportfishermen at a Hawaiian billfish tournament what this apex predator can do.

What he thought might be a tuna turned out to be a Pacific blue marlin estimated to weigh more than 550 pounds. It leaped and started "careening through the air in every conceivable direction, throwing massive walls of water with every move of its huge tail, and leaving car-size holes in the water when it came crashing down," Schwartz recalled.

"Schwartz" is fisherman/photographer Jon Schwartz. Fortunately, he and a whole gaggle of photographers were on the scene when the hooked animal took on the press boat:

Now mind you, I am watching all of this through my 300 mm telephoto lens. I was so focused on getting the shot that I probably lost sense of what was really happening in terms of how the fish was behaving. All I knew was that the fish came at us so quickly that soon I was unable to see it through the camera (see shot #4 in the photo above) and I was starting to miss it because my lens was too long! "It must be close!" I thought! "Where's my wide lens?"

This is the beast that Ernest Hemingway told you about (that's him in the photo, on a dock in Bimini with four freshly landed marlins in 1935). And these fish can swim at upwards of 100 kilometers (62 miles) an hour.

Then, as if according to script, the maniacal marlin broke the hook and got away. He probably didn't get the memo that said this was a tag-and-release tournament.

Fun Viewing: Tagging A Great White (UPDATED)

Watch in this National Geographic video as a team of "Shark Men" researchers hauls a Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias) out of the leady waters off Guadalupe to tag it and release it -- perhaps a bit harried but unharmed.

Show it to your kids and they'll grow up wanting to be ichthyologists, I bet.

(UPDATE: In response to the subsequent discovery that the same Great White had sustained serious injury and speculation that the injury was a result of Dr. Michael Domeier's catch-and-tag operation. This post could put some of that criticism to rest, concluding:

The full video clearly shows that Junior’s injuries are caused by intraspecies conflict and not a direct result of the capture method. The concern that the tagging method seriously injured this shark is not supported by the evidence at hand.

Dr. Domeier’s team was able to attach a satellite tag to Junior during his original capture. Data from that tag shows that Junior is still swimming.

The direct cause of the mutilation near the tagged animal's jaw appears to have been another shark, then, not infection or other effect of the hauling-out and tagging.)

New Trove From Marine Census

The Census of Marine Life has issued a fresh batch of information, and there are some spell-binding images of creatures from some of the best biological "hotspots" on the globe. A tooth-tongued dragonfish, an undersea Venus fly-trap (Actinoscyphia sp.) from the Gulf of Mexico, a deep-sea "flashing" jellyfish (Atolla wyvillei) from Japan's Izu Islands, a cuddly roundnose grenadier fish (Coryphaenoides rupestris) and a new species of knobbed sea cucumber (Elpidia belyaevi) are some of the most arresting.

It's part of the run-up to the scheduled release in October of the final summary of a decade of this gargantuan project.

The title this time is "What Lives in the Sea?" with the focus on "an inventory of species distribution and diversity in key global ocean areas." I'll quote from the press release in a moment, but first take a look at these photographs, and these, and videos from CoML (and National Geographic).

Here's CoML on the publication of these latest findings:

Scientists combined information collected over centuries with data obtained during the decade-long Census to create a roll call of species in 25 biologically representative regions -- from the Antarctic through temperate and tropical seas to the Arctic.

Their papers help set a baseline for measuring changes that humanity and nature will cause.

They also crown five locations as ocean diversity leaders:

Australian and Japanese waters, which each feature almost 33,000 forms of life that have earned the status of “species” (and thus a scientific name such as Carcharodon carcharias, a.k.a. the great white shark), are by far the most biodiverse. The oceans off China, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico round out the top five areas most diverse in known species.

The video notes researchers have found that some of those top five areas "are also the most threatened" -- the Mediterranean, waters off China, and the Gulf of Mexico. Alas, you might notice that a good number of the species in the slide show reside in the Gulf of Mexico, currently saturated with BP crude.

I just got "World Ocean Census" -- one of many CoML-related books on offer -- a glimpse into what has gone into this incredible, collaborative scientific effort. I look forward to reading it and others ahead of the October 4 findings.

Sixgill Shark Siblings' Secret Society

Genetic taggers team up with other scientists in Puget Sound and discover that the siblings of at least one shark species appear to maintain "loose associations," according to Discovery News.

Mother sharks return to Puget Sound to give birth to pups, and then these siblings make a point of sticking together.

..."What we're interested in is if we can flip this observation around: Are the relationships we're seeing between brothers and sisters traveling together and staying together as juveniles transferable to other shark species as well?" said Christiansen. "We don't know; we'd like to see some effort going into other shark species to see if that's present."

And while you're at the Discovery website, click through Michael Reilly's slideshow of the latest bizarre finds from the Census of Marine Life.

(Photo of Blunt-nose Sixgill Shark [Hexanchus griseus] off Seattle by Dan Hershman)

Golden Lobster

A lobsterman finds a pot of gold off Rhode Island: gold lobster, that is. Says the "Providence Journal":

“I thought, holy cow, this is unusual. And no one else around here has ever seen anything like it either,” said (lobster fisherman Denny) Ingram.

It might be tempting to launch into diatribes against ecological destruction, factory effluent, or radioactive sludge (or, barring any of those, a villainous scientist bent on global destruction via mutant lobsters). The local lobsters are in trouble, after all.

But, in fact, the Providence paper says it's no big thing. Like winning the lottery.

Yellow lobsters are rare, but not unheard of. When one was brought ashore in Massachusetts last year, several experts said its coloration came from a gene carried by both parents, and it occurs in about one in 30 million lobsters.

The same figure was cited when a yellow lobster was brought ashore in Maine in 2006.

And it might be a good thing this one was caught when it was, according to Anne Dimonti of the Audubon Education Center. Funky-colored lobsters are at an adaptational disadvantage, she says:

“Being born a blue lobster is not so rare; what’s rare is surviving into adulthood as a blue lobster,” Dimonti said. “When you’re a bright blue baby lobster walking around on the ocean bottom, somebody is going to pick you off very quickly.”

Lobster shells are colored with blue, yellow and red pigments, so genetic variations are expected.

AP adds:

It's also apparently good luck for this lobster, who will not be heading to anyone's dinner table.

Judging by the size of it, it's got no business heading to anyone's dinner table. Instead, it should be out frollicking with other juvenile lobsters.

Like these guys.

photo by Steven G. Johnson of yellow lobster at the New England Aquarium.

Jellyfish Scourge: For Whom The Bells Toll

In the Sherlock Holmes tale "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle left no doubt as to the pernicious nature of the jellyfish (although the clever title would mislead anyone unfamiliar with them).

Aside from the Lion's Mane Jellyfish (Cyanea capillata), other non-human culprits unmasked by the world's best-known sleuth include a "swamp adder" and, of course, a big dog. But Doyle attributed signally excruciating potency to the giant cnidarian (whose nematocyst-laced tentacles can outstretch a Blue Whale):

As he fell over, his Burberry, which had been simply thrown round his shoulders, slipped off, exposing his trunk. We stared at it in amazement. His back was covered with dark red lines as though he had been terribly flogged by a thin wire scourge. The instrument with which this punishment had been inflicted was clearly flexible, for the long, angry weals curved round his shoulders and ribs. There was blood dripping down his chin, for he had bitten through his lower lip in the paroxysm of his agony. His drawn and distorted face told how terrible that agony had been.

That was 1907, with Sir Arthur's bell-topped killer vaguely foreshadowing the kind of panic that Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg's classic "Jaws" would spawn more than a half-century later.

Don't look now; but the narrative of the ravenous beasts is back. Unpopular anyways outside of Asian salads, the deceptively beautiful medusa is experiencing a return to scurrilousness.

It's more serious than just that rampaging zombie jellyfish that stung 100 or so New Hampshire bathers in late July. (Even in death, they're locked and loaded, as Kevin Zelnio at Deep-Sea News explains in connection with that incident.)

So Smithsonian.com has revisited the question of a jellyfish scourge. In addition to offering an engaging boilerplate description of the animals that alone makes the piece worth reading, Abigail Tucker explores how many ill-tempered jellyfish is too many jellyfish:

All around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly—reproducing in astonishing numbers and congregating where they’ve supposedly never been seen before. Jellyfish have halted seafloor diamond mining off the coast of Namibia by gumming up sediment-removal systems. Jellies scarf so much food in the Caspian Sea they’re contributing to the commercial extinction of beluga sturgeon—the source of fine caviar. In 2007, mauve stinger jellyfish stung and asphyxiated more than 100,000 farmed salmon off the coast of Ireland as aquaculturists on a boat watched in horror. The jelly swarm reportedly was 35 feet deep and covered ten square miles.

Nightmarish accounts of “Jellyfish Gone Wild,” as a 2008 National Science Foundation report called the phenomenon, stretch from the fjords of Norway to the resorts of Thailand. By clogging cooling equipment, jellies have shut down nuclear power plants in several countries; they partially disabled the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan four years ago. In 2005, jellies struck the Philippines again, this time incapacitating 127 police officers who had waded chest-deep in seawater during a counterterrorism exercise, apparently oblivious to the more imminent threat. (Dozens were hospitalized.) This past fall, a ten-ton fishing trawler off the coast of Japan capsized and sank while hauling in a netful of 450-pound Nomura’s jellies.

So there's a lot of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence of mounting jelly hell. But disabling and overturning ships? Not even Spielberg depicted his Great White Antihero crippling an aircraft carrier. (That wouldn't come until "Jaws 2.")

But before you go get a bigger boat, Mr. Mundus, it's important to read on. Tucker is quick to quote experts who say the jury is still out on this possible pestilence and its likely causes, which predictably include human encroachment on their habitat and devastation of the jellyfish's natural enemies (like swordfish, anchovies, bearded gobies, and some sea turtles).

Steven Haddock, a zooplankton scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), is concerned that researchers and the news media may be overreacting to a few isolated jelly outbreaks. Not enough is known about historical jelly abundances to distinguish between natural fluctuation and long-term change, he says. Are there really more of the creatures, or are people simply more prone to notice and report them? Are the jellyfish changing, or is our perspective? A self-described “jelly hugger,” Haddock worries that jellyfish are taking the blame for messing up the seas when we’re the ones causing the damage. “I just wish that people had the perception that jellyfish are not the enemy here,” Haddock says.

Purcell, who sports jellyfish earrings the day I meet her in Monterey, says she is disgusted by what she sees as humanity’s efforts to exploit the ocean, filling it with fish farms and oil wells and fertilizer. Compared with fish, jellies are “better feeders, better growers, more tolerant of all kinds of things,” she told me, adding of the marine environment: “I think it’s entirely possible we’ve made things better for jellyfish.” Part of her likes the idea of unruly jellies causing a commotion and foiling our plans. She’s cheering for them, almost.

So it's not a direct link, but generally, it looks like the worse damage we inflict on our seas, the more we can expect jellyfish to come back and sting us. A GlobalPost headlined "The New Ocean Predator: Jellyfish?" articulated the problem this way:

Unlike sharks, orcas and other aggressive carnivores, jellyfish thrive in ecosystems damaged by human activity. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Sea of Japan, oceanographers have found a common symptom among places where overfishing, chemical pollution and rising sea temperatures have killed off other species: more jellyfish.

Jellyfish are hardy indeed. Their fossil remains date back some 500-700 million years. As polyps, they can "sit dormant for a decade or more, biding (their) time," Tucker tells us. Their sting, at 1 microsecond to hit its target, is one of the fastest animal actions in the world. When turtles or other predators chomp off hunks of jellyfish, the animals simply regenerate. The arctic Lion's Mane "continues to pulsate when half its bell is imprisoned in ice, and may revive even after being solidly frozen for hours," Rachel Carson tells us. And on and on.

While technically speaking they're sophonophores rather than "true jellies," the Portuguese Man-of-War (Physalia physalis) is a jellyfish in most people's minds. And Carson suggested after one encounter that it demonstrated a "strong illusion of sentience":

The sail, or float, of a Portuguese man-of-war is filled with gas secreted by the so-called gas gland. The gas is largely nitrogen (85 to 91 per cent) with a small amount of oxygen and a trace of argon. Although some siphonophores can deflate the air sac and sink into deep water if the surface is rough, Physalia apparently cannot. However, it does have some control over the position and degree of expansion of the sac. I once had a graphic demonstration of this when I found a medium-size man-of-war stranded on a South Carolina beach. After keeping it overnight in a bucket of salt water, I attempted to return it to the sea. The tide was ebbing; I waded out into the chilly March water, keeping the Physalia in its bucket out of respect for its stinging abilities, then hurled it as far into the sea as I could. Over and over, the incoming waves caught it and returned it to the shallows. Sometimes with my help, sometimes without, it would manage to take off again, visibly adjusting the shape and position of the sail as it scudded along before the wind, which was blowing out of the south, straight up the beach. Sometimes it could successfully ride over an incoming wave; sometimes it would be caught and hustled and bumped along through thinning waters. But whether in difficulty or enjoying momentary success, there was nothing passive in the attitude of the creature. There was, instead, a strong illusion of sentience. This was no helpless bit of flotsam, but a living creature exerting every means at its disposal to control its fate. When I last saw it, a small blue sail far up the beach, it was pointed out to sea, waiting for the moment it could take off again. (p. 150 "The Edge of the Sea")

Now, she's not claiming that Portuguese Man-of-Wars would recognize themselves in a mirror or blush at buying their clothes off the rack. However, it's not an inconceivable leap from setting a course in the wind to stinging a bather just to watch him die.

Maybe Sherlock Holmes was onto something. A jellyfish strikes again in that story, after all. But no one's saying it's the same Lion's Mane, right? Right!?