Medusas ou Jellyfish
Link do Jelly watch: http://www.jellywatch.org/
Existem muitos tipos de "Jellyfish" e este video que encontrei no boingboing realmente é muito bem feito (a música também).
Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (let's all pause a moment to reflect on kismet of that surname/job combination) made this video about the wide world of creatures that we call "jellyfish."
It's a great summary of the extreme diversity encompassed under one, catch-all name, and does a really nice job of explaining relationships between different species and families of jelly-like creatures.
Por um lado há uma grande variedade, e por outro lado, os números destas (novas?) formas de vida continuam a aumentar rápidamente...
Também no boingboing, comento então que localizei um outro artigo:
Mais info: Nomura's jellyfish
Is the world ready for this jelly? (um artigo da BoingBoing)
You can't tell from the photo, but this jellyfish is huge. Nomura jellyfish, native to the waters off China and Japan, can grow to be the size of a refrigerator, and weigh up to 400 pounds.
And, since the 1990s, there's a lot more of them.
Swarms, 500 million jellies strong, have sunk ships, writes Brandon Keim in Wired. It's part of a global increase in jellyfish populations.
Right now, nobody's sure whether this is a blip, or a new normal. But everybody would like to know how jellyfish affect ecosystems, and new research offers some sobering analysis.
Waste Slime Turns Jellyfish Into Ecological Vampires (um artigo da Wired)
That waste is useful is one of the animal kingdom’s cardinal principles. One creature’s discards are another’s dinner, and so continues the circle of life. But jellyfish, it would seem, bend the rule.
Their waste is generally inedible, food mostly for a few odd species of bacteria that live just long enough to emit a whiff of CO2, then sink.
All that nutrition and energy vanishes with barely a trace.
During a jellyfish bloom, food webs may thus be plucked and rearranged, configured to feed jellies that in turn feed almost nothing.
Whether this represents the future of Earth’s oceans depends on whom you ask, but it’s an interesting phenomenon in itself.
“Jellyfish are consuming more or less everything that’s present in the food web,” said Robert Condon, a Virginia Institute of Marine Science and co-author of a jellyfish-impact study published June 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “They’re eating a lot of the food web, and turning it into gelatinous biomass. They’re essentially stealing a lot of the energy, then putting it away.”
For most of the 20th century, “fisheries surveys would treat jellyfish as junk,” said Robert Condon of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “They would just throw them back.”
In a quest for data, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute set up Jellywatch, an online service for people to report sightings of jellyfish, algal blooms and local marine conditions.
By sharing what they see, citizens can produce large-scale surveys that scientists can’t afford on their own. The database is freely available to researchers and the public.
“If your mom goes to the beach and gets stung, she can record that,” said Condon. “We’re using that as part of our database.”
Condon and his co-authors are part of a research community whose attention has been recently transfixed by jellyfish, which evolved more than 500 million years ago and once dominated Earth’s oceans, but until the late 20th century were of largely esoteric scientific interest.
