Matthew Calamatta June 2009: a Sunday morning. I skewered the jellyfish with a shard of bamboo cane and waded back up onto the sand. The Italian lady tourist claiming her spot on the beach cried out in alarm. "Poverino!" she said, expressing pity for the limp cnidarian. I could have asked her if she wanted to give it a hug, but carried on instead and dropped the jellyfish onto a slime-heap of earlier victims. My tally for the day - about 10 minutes' worth of wading and stabbing - was six jellies. Children flitted about to stare at them, and ran around screaming "I'm a jellyfish and I'm going to sting you!" at their giggling friends.
Beach season has always been associated with jellyfish avoidance and a heightened wariness amongst Maltese and tourists alike. A beach infested with jellyfish can ruin a family day out, but a season of heavy medusae concentration can mean something more concerning, and not only in its effects on tourism. This article aims to look at the current thinking on jellyfish population, and why we should be worried if there are more jellies than usual.
Over the course of one week a diver friend and I embarked on an informal survey of jellyfish distribution about the Maltese islands, looking not just on the surface but also at depth, with scuba dives in Marsascala, Wied iz-Zurrieq, Marsamxett, Cirkewwa and Dwejra in Gozo. It was clear to us that we were not alone in our curiosity about these tentacled stinging creatures; returning from a dive on the Um El Faroud (an oil tanker purposely scuttled near the Blue Grotto), we found two fellow divers kitting up to go in. Their only question, despite being clad head to foot in neoprene: "Any jellyfish?"
It is worth taking a brief overview of how jellyfish fit into the general ecosystem, and a particular look at the type of medusa we tend to see around Malta and Gozo. Our impression (and caveat emptor, we are not marine biologists) is that we saw plenty of mauve stingers (Pelagia noctiluca) which are ocean-roaming jellies that can glow in the dark. They also come in shades of orange and brown and darker purples. No doubt you've seen them pulsing in the shallows, or riding a wave into a rock pool. These stingers spawn in December, and by the summer have grown to a size that bathers find worrying. When they reach the shallows they tend to die, and may be eaten by anemones or fireworms or certain reef fish. At Cirkewwa our dive guide saw a small wrasse sucking the tentacles off a jellyfish as though they were spaghetti off a fork.
During our week-long trawl we found rich pickings in the two beaches of Golden Bay and Ghajn Tuffieha, but we saw not one jellyfish on three visits to Wied iz-Zurrieq, and a mere single, tiny specimen in Marsascala creek. We hit the jackpot, however in Cirkewwa, where clusters of purple and orange jellies were massing against the quayside. Such was the density of the clumps in the shallows that if you had flicked a cigarette butt in the water it would have landed safely on a soft jellyfish head, marooned. Yet this was an exceptional site, and nowhere else did we see so many. Of course, anecdotal reports could be less important than we may think; as the MEPA website informs us, Pelagia noctiluca "[are] very abundant in some years, tending to collect in large numbers in bays - a natural phenomenon which occurs from time to time in the Mediterranean".
We do not know yet if 2009 will be a peak year, but we do know that the concentration and location of jellyfish depend on sea currents and wind direction. If a North-Westerly (or Majjistral) is blowing, the chances are you'll find more jellies in the bays of the north than you will on the lee side of the island.
Whether a particular bay in Malta is suitable for swimming is a pertinent question on any given Sunday, but the bigger question is whether we will see more and more jellyfish each year. When looking at longer-term trends of jellyfish numbers, more important factors are sea temperature, salinity, excess nutrients and predation. What eats jellyfish? Young tuna do. Turtles do. Yet the Med is both particularly polluted and extremely over-fished, and both elements are creating conditions for a perfect storm of jellyfish. Where have all the turtles in the Med gone? A well-known Maltese cookery book still offers a recipe for turtle soup, but the broth is not something you see in restaurants nowadays. And if turtle as food has disappeared into folk memory, the tuna is following fast behind it.
The near-annihilation of bluefin tuna, sharks and other big predators is creating an environment where the jellyfish are free to roam and to swarm in increasingly large numbers. This point bears emphasis: when the big fish go, there's no bringing them back. The collapse of fish stocks has happened elsewhere in the world, and we are doing nothing to avoid repeating it here in the Med. A recent report from Advanced Tuna Ranching Technologies, a Spanish tuna ranching consultancy, indicates that bluefin stocks may have already collapsed in 2007. And still in 2009 the pace of slaughter continues, and the quotas get filled. The big Japanese corporations may not be as perturbed as they should be by the potential removal of this prized food source. On the contrary, some seem to be planning ahead for the total extinction of the bluefin, and stockpiling as much as they can now so they can profit even more when the last tuna boat comes back with nothing but mermaids, coke cans and bits of old U-boats. And when the last sushi morsel has been slurped down in Tokyo or St Julians, what happens then?
The stark choice before us, as policy makers, as voters and as consumers, is whether to continue to raid the seas of bluefin tuna with unrelenting rapaciousness, whether to continue to order big fish-steaks at fancy restaurants, and whether to let the profit motives of the few damn us all to a sea without pelagic predator fish, but with plenty of jellyfish by way of compensation. We can choose to do something, to say we at least tried to slow down the ruination of our seas. We can pressure our MEPs, we can be careful what we buy at the supermarket or restaurant, and we can demand that our government take action based on well-publicised and universal scientific advice. We can encourage our schools to discuss books like The End of the Line, Cod, and The Unnatural History of the Sea.
Alternatively, we can learn to be like the jellyfish-loving Italian lady mentioned at the start of this piece. We can learn to appreciate the beauty of the animal, to admire its quiet, relentless pulsing and bioluminescence, to marvel at how an entire bay can be choked with millions of jellyfish. We can learn how to cook jellyfish, and get used to swimming in full-bodied wetsuits, and prepare to be asked by our grandchildren what tuna pens were for.
What to do if stung by a jellyfish
1. Don't rinse with fresh water, as this may aggravate the irritation and cause the tiny stings to release more toxins
2. Do put vinegar on the stung area. The mild acid in the vinegar will help suppress the pain
3. If no vinegar is available, use sea water, or stay in the sea
4. If stung in the eyes, dab the vinegar onto the area; don't slosh it on
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