Blue Jellyfish Occupy the Australian Beaches!
posted in Amazing Facts, Animal Species, Global Warming |
It’s summer down under, and at many Australian beaches the sands have turned as blue as the water. Many big armadas of toxic bluebottle jellyfish have swamped the Australia’s east coast in such huge numbers on the peak beach season.
Around 30,000 people have been stung by the blue jellies along this coast last year. In just a single weekend earlier in the month, beachgoers had reported more than 1,200 stings, many of them requiring hospitalization.
This has happened because of a wind shift that pushed these invertebrates ashore. The actual truth according to scientists is that 6-inch-long (15-centimeter-long) jellyfish are growing in number due to the warming ocean waters.
“[Their] numbers are closely tied with environmental changes, and last year was obviously a very aggressive year for them,” Lisa-Ann Gershwin, a jellyfish expert with SLS, told Reuters news service.
This incident happened at the wake when there are growing droves of jellyfish worldwide, like the giant Nomura’s jellyfish in Japan and rafts of jellies that swamped Mediterranean shores last summer.
“Jellyfish have been around for 600 million years,” Gershwin told the Sydney Morning Herald. “They have perfected the art of survival and are very good at taking advantage of changing conditions.”