Gershwin leaves us with a disturbing final rumination:
When I began writing this book,… I had a naive gut feeling that all was still salvageable…. But I think I underestimated how severely we have damaged our oceans and their inhabitants. I now think that we have pushed them too far, past some mysterious tipping point that came and went without fanfare, with no red circle on the calendar and without us knowing the precise moment it all became irreversible. I now sincerely believe that it is only a matter of time before the oceans as we know them and need them to be become very different places indeed. No coral reefs teeming with life. No more mighty whales or wobbling penguins. No lobsters or oysters. Sushi without fish...
...Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles...
...There is one final impact that must be considered: acidification of the oceans. This results from carbon dioxide being absorbed into seawater. Already our oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they were thirty years ago, and creatures with shells are suffering. In recent years, there has been mass failure of oyster spawning off the American Northwest, and tiny snails in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans are having their shells eaten away by the acid. Jellyfish lack hard parts: they, it seems, will pull through the acidification crisis admirably.
How could jellyfish take over the ocean? “One bite at a time” Gershwin says. And there may be no way back. A new balance may be struck, one in which jellyfish rule:
We are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s—a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn’t exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to.
At the same time that Gershwin asserts that jellyfish are taking over the oceans “one bite at a time,” she offers a slender hope that we might eat our own way through the problem. Ancient Chinese texts show that jellyfish have been part of the human diet for over 1,700 years. Recently, the global jellyfish harvest has risen to 321,000 tons, most of which is consumed in China and Japan. But unless we all develop an Asiatic zeal for the gelatinous creatures it’s hard to imagine we humans making much of a dent in the jellyfish multitudes....
From:
They’re Taking Over!
Tim Flannery / New York Review of Books
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