REHMAN RASHID
You can beat them if you eat them

2009/11/22

NOW, there’s something you don’t see every day. In fact, the accompanying photograph reveals something never before seen, much less photographed. It was not even thought biologically possible. Or physically possible, for that matter. That, dear friends and readers, is a coral eating a jellyfish.

It’s not just that such a thing had never been photographed. Many things have never been photog raphed.

Even something as huge as the giant squid Architeuthis, known to exist since ancient times,was only photographed alive in 2005.

What this says for very small things, of course, is that the vast majority of species on Planet Earth probably emerged, proliferated and went extinct without our ever getting to know them. Corals and jellyfish, however, we thought we knew quite well.

They’re related, after all, in the phylum Cnidar ia. Coral polyps are tiny jellyfish turned upside down and cemented to their beds by their heads, while jellyfish are polyps that decided a long time ago to uproot and go see the world.

Fungia coral ingesting an Aurelia jellyfish in the Red Sea.

You might say some Cnidarians decided to urbanise, while others opted to run wild and free.

You can’t miss them now: civilised coral polyps form structures as big as the Great Barrier Reef, while Mat Rempit pelagic jellyfish… well, if you go down to the beach today you’re in for a big surprise. They’re everywhere.

In fact, there has been such an unusual abundance of jellyfish in the world's oceans lately that scientists are wondering if global warming might be a contributing factor.

Warmer seas might be incubating blooms of plankton, algae and the things jellyfish eat, conducing to their own proliferation.

Moreover, jellyfish have high tolerance for low salinity and can hang out in brackish water inshore, feasting on the ever-increasing abundance of organic richness washing down to the sea with the rivers and the rain from what’s left of the land.

The most awesome jellyfish explosion by far is happening off Japan, where the people who brought you Godzilla now run screaming from Echizen Kurage, the Giant Killer Blob.

The monstrous Nomura’s jellyfish, Nemopilema nomurai — the world’s biggest; a pulsing gelatinous mass 2m in diameter weighing 200kg with a matted beard of stinging tentacles wadded around its mouth—is multiplying in numbers so great they cover the sea, shred fishermen’s nets and clog the intakes of nuclear power plants.

And they eat what fish eat, which is not as much of a problem for the fish as you might think because they eat the fish too, leaving little or nothing for fishermen or any other life forms in, on or under the sea to eat.

Other kinds of animals also go through periodic population explosions — Crown-of-Thorns starfish, for example, or locusts, or realityshow contestants.

Some researchers see outbreaks of pandemic viruses as analogous — like plagues of locusts, coral-eating starfish or open-house attendees, they wipe out so much of their fodder so swiftly that they die back soon enough, having eaten themselves right out of food.

If and when this happens with jellyfish plagues of the present proportions, what they leave behind will be coastal fisheries and biodiversity devastated beyond all but long-term recovery.

Which is why marine ecologists are so excited about this weird role-reversal photographed by Israeli researchers in the Red Sea. It’s so perfectly poetic.

In the Gulf of Aqaba, the jellyfish explosion has been of the common species Aurelia aurita, the moon jellyfish.

While unprecedented millions of them were vacuuming up all the plankton and other food material in those waters, down below on the seabed the hungry Fungia scruposa were waiting.

These are unusual corals. Unlike those that aggregate by the uncountable billions in reefs that can stretch thousands of kilometres, these live alone.

They are solitary polyps, although they often clump together in piles, and they can grow up to 30cm across.

Related species are very common in our own seas. If all the polyps that make up the world’s coral reefs were the size of Fung ia, they would be the planet.

And now that the jellyfish have eaten all their food, they’ve started eating the jellyfish.

And so have the coastal fishing communities of Japan hardest hit by the invasion of those giant killer blobs.

Having lost their nets and catch to Nemopilema (and in one case an entire fishing trawler, which capsized and sank trying to haul in a net full of them), these fishermen are now harvesting the bloated beasts to be sliced, diced, dried, salted and sold for food. (Dense with collagen, the stuff is touted as good for the skin.) No alien-invasion movie plot has yet considered saving the planet by eating the invader, but that’s theway the planet itselfwould seem to prefer taking care of this business.

As Sun Tzu probably never said but surely would have, had he ever met the Giant Killer Blob From Hell: you can beat ’em if you eat ’em.

The writer was once a marine biologist. But only once. He can be reached at rehman@nstp.com.my