This is a story by Deep End chef, Eddie Lin. You just have to visit his website.
http://www.deependdining.com/
THE INVADERS ARRIVE
“Take us (slooorp) to your leader,” ordered the Commandant of the Jellyfish Army.
With his troops massed behind him, Commandant Jellyfish stood upright, bell-shaped, muculent and dripping. The Jellies all stood upright, some on shore and others filed into the sea like a string of alien mushrooms. By some freak acceleration in evolution caused by global climate change or “The Warming”, jellyfish now possessed sensory organs, brains and leg-like tentacles with deadly stingers.
Oh, and they could speak perfect English too.
“Barack Obama?” I replied.
“No,” the massive, menacing yet squishy jellyfish snorted.
“Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton?”
“No, the guy who (slllooorp) screwed up the environment and (sloorp) made it possible for us to take over the seas,”
“Oh, him. He hasn’t been our leader for years.”
“We just wanted to thank him for The Warming (sloorp). He didn’t invent it but he sure didn’t do anything to stop it. Now, I must ask you to surrender. (sssloorp) The mass stingings will commence in fifteen minutes.”
At that moment I wiggled around like a merman out of water — this was my signal to attack.
From seemingly nowhere my band of resistance fighters popped out of the sand, propelled down from the cliffs and charged the Jellies. All of my fighters were of Asian descent and wielded Global 8-inch chef knives and carried pots of freshly boiled water.
Tears welled up in my eyes. It was a magnificent sight. Like a culinary cavalry.
The Jellies shrieked at an octave just outside of human hearing range. “Holy Okara! Chinese foodies!!” the Jellyfish Commandant bellowed.
It was too late for the Jellies. With the element of surprise to our advantage, their army was brutally and mercilessly sliced, boiled and whipped into jellyfish appetizers. Our victory was exhausting and, unfortunately, not without cost. We lost a dozen comrades to suicide stingers.
But there were still blooms upon blooms of Jellies out in the wide-open seas numbering in the billions. With no predators or competition to speak of due to overfishing and warming waters, jellyfish have thrived and multiplied. Warmer waters are the ideal climate for them so not everything opposes global warming. The Jellies love it.
Although what they didn’t count on was a whole lot of Chinese with a taste for nicely marinated invertebrates.
The War of the Jellies had just begun.
This was my peek into a dark future. However horrific, I saw it as a gift. So I’m sharing it with you and telling you all — it’s not too late to avoid this future shock scenario. There are many, many things you can do, like:
1) Vote for environmentally friendly leaders.
2) Live your life green.
3) Diversify your diet so you don’t eat as much of the really popular fish like certain tuna, red snapper and Chilean seabass.
4) And learn to love, I mean really love, eating jellyfish because there are plenty of them.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
That's Life
Most scientists looking for the origin of life seem blinded by the fact that the answer is so obvious. Life originated in the universe at exactly the same time and in indentical fashion to gravity - with the big bang.
As matter vaporised in the explosion and travelled outward in the form of hydrogen atoms that rapidly flew apart from each other, neither the gravitational force or the life force had any significant intensity.
However, as the atoms slowed and their weak gravitational forces began to pull them together into clouds (nebulae) their gravity fields strengthened, lumping them into huge masses with such an extreme gravitational pull on each other that they all tried to be in the center. The result, of course, is that they began to fuse with each other releasing some of their protons with the immense power of a hundren million hydrogen bombs.
In the meantime, the life force remained weak as the universe expanded. Nothing yet existed for it to act upon. Unlike gravity, which is a 'brute' force, acting in one direction on anything with mass, life is a sophisticed, vibrant force that requires a combination of elements in close proximity to each other, 'tuned' to its unique frequency - something like a crystal radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio.
Crystal radios require no battery or power source except the power received from radio waves themselves. They need only a crystal and a special thin wire that contacts it. They are so simple that even children made them at home in the early days of radio. Scientists can make simple life detectors - let's call them ancestors - the same way, using a bit of RNA or DNA, and amino acid.
When I was in training to become a radio technician in the Canadian airforce, our instructor told of a man who had a new tooth filling hearing radio programs playing in his mouth. The silver filling in contact with some impurity in the enamel of his tooth acted as a crystal set. I didn't believe it, but it was a good story and I told it many times when I too became an instructor.
The challenge of receiving weak radio or life force signals is not in combining the elements. In the case of radio, almost any crystal or metal whisker (wire) will work to some degree, as will any RNA, DNA, and amino acid for detection of life. The key is in tuning the wire of the radio, or the elements of the the life detector.
That's a big job, of course, but we are only talking about the principle here. Nucleotides and DNA are much too small and fragile for children of electronics technicians to put together with a soldering gun.
Sheref Mansy, a scientist with the University of Trento, in Italy, is closest to the secret. Last year, he was able to create a protocell that replicated its DNA using only four components: fatty acids to make the membrane, and DNA template, primer and activated nucleotides. That's basically what it took the trial and error methods of nature to accomplish in the first billion years earth's existence.
Even Mansy is missing the point though. You can't create life no matter how hard you try. Life already exists. The best you can do is create a life detector. Everybody knows how to do that!
As matter vaporised in the explosion and travelled outward in the form of hydrogen atoms that rapidly flew apart from each other, neither the gravitational force or the life force had any significant intensity.
However, as the atoms slowed and their weak gravitational forces began to pull them together into clouds (nebulae) their gravity fields strengthened, lumping them into huge masses with such an extreme gravitational pull on each other that they all tried to be in the center. The result, of course, is that they began to fuse with each other releasing some of their protons with the immense power of a hundren million hydrogen bombs.
In the meantime, the life force remained weak as the universe expanded. Nothing yet existed for it to act upon. Unlike gravity, which is a 'brute' force, acting in one direction on anything with mass, life is a sophisticed, vibrant force that requires a combination of elements in close proximity to each other, 'tuned' to its unique frequency - something like a crystal radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio.
Crystal radios require no battery or power source except the power received from radio waves themselves. They need only a crystal and a special thin wire that contacts it. They are so simple that even children made them at home in the early days of radio. Scientists can make simple life detectors - let's call them ancestors - the same way, using a bit of RNA or DNA, and amino acid.
When I was in training to become a radio technician in the Canadian airforce, our instructor told of a man who had a new tooth filling hearing radio programs playing in his mouth. The silver filling in contact with some impurity in the enamel of his tooth acted as a crystal set. I didn't believe it, but it was a good story and I told it many times when I too became an instructor.
The challenge of receiving weak radio or life force signals is not in combining the elements. In the case of radio, almost any crystal or metal whisker (wire) will work to some degree, as will any RNA, DNA, and amino acid for detection of life. The key is in tuning the wire of the radio, or the elements of the the life detector.
That's a big job, of course, but we are only talking about the principle here. Nucleotides and DNA are much too small and fragile for children of electronics technicians to put together with a soldering gun.
Sheref Mansy, a scientist with the University of Trento, in Italy, is closest to the secret. Last year, he was able to create a protocell that replicated its DNA using only four components: fatty acids to make the membrane, and DNA template, primer and activated nucleotides. That's basically what it took the trial and error methods of nature to accomplish in the first billion years earth's existence.
Even Mansy is missing the point though. You can't create life no matter how hard you try. Life already exists. The best you can do is create a life detector. Everybody knows how to do that!
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
This jelly doesn't have to be refrigerated
Once thought to embody the souls of drowned sailors, Jellies live in every ocean from the equator to the poles, from the surface of the sea to the deepest darkness. Jellyfish are estimated to have been around for over 500 million years old - surviving crashing comets, mass extinctions, global warming, Ice Ages, and continental drift. While the Jellyfish is just about the simplest forms of animal, the species has immense diversity. Some pulse peacefully like living lava lamps; others beat like a heart going fast enough to burst; some forever throb upside-down.
As Jellyfish travel the tides and currents with languid ease, these long term survivors show the value and survival ability of simplicity. When the creator of life set about producing his first multi-celled animal, he said to himself, "keep it simple, stupid" and thus created the the utimate survivor. The simple jellyfish will last until all of earth's water is drained into the infinite void and the sea bed is dried out with some cosmic dishcloth.
Thanks to http://www.etsy.com/index.php
As Jellyfish travel the tides and currents with languid ease, these long term survivors show the value and survival ability of simplicity. When the creator of life set about producing his first multi-celled animal, he said to himself, "keep it simple, stupid" and thus created the the utimate survivor. The simple jellyfish will last until all of earth's water is drained into the infinite void and the sea bed is dried out with some cosmic dishcloth.
Thanks to http://www.etsy.com/index.php
Monday, September 28, 2009
Dangerous Drifters
From New York to Namibia, to Ireland, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines, jellyfish numbers are exploding, closing beaches, shutting down nuclear plants, invading floating fish farms, ruining fishing nets, and injuring swimmers. The biomass of jellyfish is now greater than that of fish in some of the seas that were once considered the best commercial fishing zones in the world .
The Black Sea is one of those 'used-to-be', important commercial fish producers, with great economic value for the people of the countries bordering its shores: Turkey, The Ukraine, Georgia, Russian and Bulgaria. However, in the 1980s, the carnivorous jellyfish Mnemiopsis, arrived via ocean tanker ballast water. Finding conditions ideally suited for their wants and desires, they immediately set up housekeeping and began to take over the the polluted waters. Within a few years, there wasn't enough space left for the sturgeon and other fish species, and the fishing industry collapsed.
Similarly, the fishing grounds off the Namibian coast, which used to be gorged with sardines, anchovies, and pilchards now contain a fish biomass of less than 3.6 million metric tons, while the number of jellyfish has grown to over 12.2 million tons. Meanwhile, the Sea of Japan has become plagued with a steady steady stream of five million, giant 450 pound Nomura's jellyfish, pouring in from the China Sea every day during the months of September and October. In America, the Gulf of Mexico hosts large swarms of jellyfish that are often so dense they contain more jelly than water.
One of the most bizarre incidents occurred off the north coast of Ireland in November 2007, when a swarm of jellyfish 10 miles square and 35 feet deep, invaded Ireland's only fish farm In Glenarm Bay, Cushendun, off the County Antrim coast. Billions of fist-sized mauve stingers drifted over the cages like some thick red tide, stinging to death or suffocating the entire stock of more than 120,000 adult salmon.
John Russell, head of the Northern Salmon Company farm, said the fish were destined for Christmas sales to high-end caterers in Britain. The loss was estimated at $2 million, wiping out the company's cash flow until the following fall, when young fish at their Red Bay site were big enough for market. However, the stingers popped that bubble a couple of days later, when they drifted into Red Bay killed those fish too.
Russell said he ordered three 35-foot boats into the area in attempt to salvage some of the fish, but they were unable to get through the jelly. “We were absolutely helpless to do anything,” he said.
"One of the difficulties with the Glenarm site is the strength of the tide," a fisheries officer told reporters. "The tide pulled in the jellyfish and the water cannot move through the cages. The fish were asphyxiated because they have no water moving through the cages to bring oxygen."
It is hard to imagine a mass of jellyfish packed together so tightly that they act like a single monstrous creature ten miles in diameter (twice the size of the city of Vancouver, Canada) and thirty-five feet deep.
Unusual concentrations of the mauve stinger jellyfish, Pelagia noctiluca, are common off Spain's Balearic Islands, as well as elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In fact, they show up on most of Europe's popular beach resorts in August every year, stinging thousands of bathers. While not lethal, the stings are extremely painful. Peppering the burning area with meat tenderizer seems to ease the pain somewhat. Urine, which is an oft-recommended home remedy, can actually heighten the pain.
Pelagia noctiluca grows up to 10 centimeters wide, and is sometimes also called the nightlight jellyfish because it produces a blue-green luminescent mucus, most often seen as a glow in ships' wakes at night. But its more common name, mauve stinger, reflects the species' most noticeable effect on people.
The Black Sea is one of those 'used-to-be', important commercial fish producers, with great economic value for the people of the countries bordering its shores: Turkey, The Ukraine, Georgia, Russian and Bulgaria. However, in the 1980s, the carnivorous jellyfish Mnemiopsis, arrived via ocean tanker ballast water. Finding conditions ideally suited for their wants and desires, they immediately set up housekeeping and began to take over the the polluted waters. Within a few years, there wasn't enough space left for the sturgeon and other fish species, and the fishing industry collapsed.
Similarly, the fishing grounds off the Namibian coast, which used to be gorged with sardines, anchovies, and pilchards now contain a fish biomass of less than 3.6 million metric tons, while the number of jellyfish has grown to over 12.2 million tons. Meanwhile, the Sea of Japan has become plagued with a steady steady stream of five million, giant 450 pound Nomura's jellyfish, pouring in from the China Sea every day during the months of September and October. In America, the Gulf of Mexico hosts large swarms of jellyfish that are often so dense they contain more jelly than water.
One of the most bizarre incidents occurred off the north coast of Ireland in November 2007, when a swarm of jellyfish 10 miles square and 35 feet deep, invaded Ireland's only fish farm In Glenarm Bay, Cushendun, off the County Antrim coast. Billions of fist-sized mauve stingers drifted over the cages like some thick red tide, stinging to death or suffocating the entire stock of more than 120,000 adult salmon.
John Russell, head of the Northern Salmon Company farm, said the fish were destined for Christmas sales to high-end caterers in Britain. The loss was estimated at $2 million, wiping out the company's cash flow until the following fall, when young fish at their Red Bay site were big enough for market. However, the stingers popped that bubble a couple of days later, when they drifted into Red Bay killed those fish too.
Russell said he ordered three 35-foot boats into the area in attempt to salvage some of the fish, but they were unable to get through the jelly. “We were absolutely helpless to do anything,” he said.
"One of the difficulties with the Glenarm site is the strength of the tide," a fisheries officer told reporters. "The tide pulled in the jellyfish and the water cannot move through the cages. The fish were asphyxiated because they have no water moving through the cages to bring oxygen."
It is hard to imagine a mass of jellyfish packed together so tightly that they act like a single monstrous creature ten miles in diameter (twice the size of the city of Vancouver, Canada) and thirty-five feet deep.
Unusual concentrations of the mauve stinger jellyfish, Pelagia noctiluca, are common off Spain's Balearic Islands, as well as elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In fact, they show up on most of Europe's popular beach resorts in August every year, stinging thousands of bathers. While not lethal, the stings are extremely painful. Peppering the burning area with meat tenderizer seems to ease the pain somewhat. Urine, which is an oft-recommended home remedy, can actually heighten the pain.
Pelagia noctiluca grows up to 10 centimeters wide, and is sometimes also called the nightlight jellyfish because it produces a blue-green luminescent mucus, most often seen as a glow in ships' wakes at night. But its more common name, mauve stinger, reflects the species' most noticeable effect on people.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Passive Predators? They're deadlier than sharks!
In January 2006, 21-year-old Sarah Whiley died after being savaged by three huge bull sharks at a protected beach near the Amity (coincidentally the same name as the village in “Jaws”) Point fishing village in south-east Queensland. They bit both of her arms off at the elbows and tore chunks of flesh out of her torso and legs. Blood poured from her body as she was carried to shore by friends. Although an Emergency Services helicopter was on the scene quickly, and she was admitted to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane within an hour of the attack, she had lost too much blood. Surgeons were unable to save her.
The following day, a seven year old girl was killed by a jellyfish at a beach near the north tip of Queensland. The jelly tentacles wrapped around her waist as she played in the water, causing a mild itching sensation that quickly elevated to an intense, shocking agony that sent her screaming to shore where she collapsed at her mother's feet within a minute of being attacked, unconscious and no longer breathing. She never recovered.
Both incidents were terrible tragedies, but the shark attack generated much more blood and horror than the box jellyfish encounter, even though both victims suffered equal agony and terror. The main significance of the two tragedies is that the shark attack was a rarity where the jellyfish killing is a common occurrence in the seas between Northern Australia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. In fact, jellies kill forty times the number of people than do all species of sharks everywhere in the world. The non-fatal injury ratio is even higher – thousands of times higher. There have been less than 2,000 shark attacks off the coasts of United States in the last fifty years, while more than 500,000 swimmers were stung by jellyfish in the beach waters of America in 2009 alone. The statistics world wide are in the millions.
Sixty years ago, hardly anybody had ever seen or heard of jellyfish, although the pretty pale blue Portugese man of war – which isn't really a jellyfish –sometimes washed ashore on the beaches of Florida, Hawaii, and the Mediterranean. The man o war was known to be dangerous, but few people ever experienced the excruciating pain inflicted by the thousands of tiny poisonous spears arming its tentacles. Even in places like Australia and Indonesia where more than forty people are now killed each year by another deadly species, the box jelly, incidents were rare in the first half of the 1900's. It wasn't until 1958 that the number of fatalities became high enough to warrant recording. Today, beaches around the world are routinely closed periodically during “jellyfish seasons” to prevent injury to bathers.
An incident in New York Harbor on July 22nd this year highlights the problem. Argentine triathlete Esteban Neira, 32, died of a heart attack in the Hudson River during the swimming leg of the New York City Triathlon. Because he was in top physical shape and had no previous record of heart problems previously it is suspected that Neira's heart attack may have been triggered by a jelly encounter. Many of the other athletes were stung by jellyfish during the event, Until that time, few of New York's 16 million residents had any idea that dangerous jellyfish lurked in the polluted waters of the Harbor.
Passive Predators is an urgent wake up call to the millions of people around the world who are unaware that jellyfish are rapidly taking over the seas, filling in for the 90% loss of fish and mammals that has occurred over the last fifty years. Not only do they pose a serious threat to anyone hoping to enjoy a pleasant visit to any of the world's sea-side beaches, they are a serious problem for millions of fishermen the world over.
Still, jellies may also be the last hope for saving the countless marine animals endangered by today's overly efficient fish-factory ships, and habitat destructive bottom-draggers, that are creating the most devastating mass extinction in the history of multi-celled life in the oceans.
My new book, entitled 'Passive Predators - the Jellyfish Invasions'is ready for publication and looking for a home with a major publisher. Come back often for more exciting information about the amazing jellyfish.
The following day, a seven year old girl was killed by a jellyfish at a beach near the north tip of Queensland. The jelly tentacles wrapped around her waist as she played in the water, causing a mild itching sensation that quickly elevated to an intense, shocking agony that sent her screaming to shore where she collapsed at her mother's feet within a minute of being attacked, unconscious and no longer breathing. She never recovered.
Both incidents were terrible tragedies, but the shark attack generated much more blood and horror than the box jellyfish encounter, even though both victims suffered equal agony and terror. The main significance of the two tragedies is that the shark attack was a rarity where the jellyfish killing is a common occurrence in the seas between Northern Australia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. In fact, jellies kill forty times the number of people than do all species of sharks everywhere in the world. The non-fatal injury ratio is even higher – thousands of times higher. There have been less than 2,000 shark attacks off the coasts of United States in the last fifty years, while more than 500,000 swimmers were stung by jellyfish in the beach waters of America in 2009 alone. The statistics world wide are in the millions.
Sixty years ago, hardly anybody had ever seen or heard of jellyfish, although the pretty pale blue Portugese man of war – which isn't really a jellyfish –sometimes washed ashore on the beaches of Florida, Hawaii, and the Mediterranean. The man o war was known to be dangerous, but few people ever experienced the excruciating pain inflicted by the thousands of tiny poisonous spears arming its tentacles. Even in places like Australia and Indonesia where more than forty people are now killed each year by another deadly species, the box jelly, incidents were rare in the first half of the 1900's. It wasn't until 1958 that the number of fatalities became high enough to warrant recording. Today, beaches around the world are routinely closed periodically during “jellyfish seasons” to prevent injury to bathers.
An incident in New York Harbor on July 22nd this year highlights the problem. Argentine triathlete Esteban Neira, 32, died of a heart attack in the Hudson River during the swimming leg of the New York City Triathlon. Because he was in top physical shape and had no previous record of heart problems previously it is suspected that Neira's heart attack may have been triggered by a jelly encounter. Many of the other athletes were stung by jellyfish during the event, Until that time, few of New York's 16 million residents had any idea that dangerous jellyfish lurked in the polluted waters of the Harbor.
Passive Predators is an urgent wake up call to the millions of people around the world who are unaware that jellyfish are rapidly taking over the seas, filling in for the 90% loss of fish and mammals that has occurred over the last fifty years. Not only do they pose a serious threat to anyone hoping to enjoy a pleasant visit to any of the world's sea-side beaches, they are a serious problem for millions of fishermen the world over.
Still, jellies may also be the last hope for saving the countless marine animals endangered by today's overly efficient fish-factory ships, and habitat destructive bottom-draggers, that are creating the most devastating mass extinction in the history of multi-celled life in the oceans.
My new book, entitled 'Passive Predators - the Jellyfish Invasions'is ready for publication and looking for a home with a major publisher. Come back often for more exciting information about the amazing jellyfish.
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