Earth Day! The day that we celebrate our Earth and how amazing it is, and the day that we also reflect on how to preserve the Earth for many years to come. Below I have pasted a copy of an editorial about jellyfish overpopulation, and how warming oceans and climate change is effecting it. I hope you enjoy!

Save Our Oceans from the King of the Sea

For the last couple of decades, Scyphozoa, or jellyfish, have been taking over our oceans. How are these brainless, blob creatures taking over the seas? The answer is found in the warming waters, making an ideal place for “jellyfish blooms”. Another contributing factor is the high demand for fish, including mackerel, these fish are responsible for eating jellyfish and controlling their population. But overfishing is causing an abundance of jellyfish that the fish population cannot keep up with. Believe it or not, the overpopulation of jellyfish is becoming worse than anyone would think. “… surging jellyfish numbers have caused power plant outages,” Gwynn Guilford, a reporter, wrote in 2013, “destroyed fisheries and cluttered the beaches of holiday destinations.”
The jellyfish population is not helping any other sea life either. In every ecosystem, there is always a dominant fish, and when the jellyfish arrive they take over and are the most dominant animal in that part of the ocean. They also compete with smaller fish when it comes to food, and then the jellies will eat the fish eggs and decrease the fish population. Jellyfish also can reproduce very quickly using polyps, “little bundles of clones—that attach to hard surfaces and wait for their opportunity to release small jellyfish,” states Gwynn Guilford on Quartz. The polyps then make copies of themselves making lots of additions to the immense jellyfish population.
The steps we need to take to cut down the amount of jellyfish in the ocean are pretty simple. We need to stop overfishing. The fish that eat jellyfish do not have a big enough population to tremendously affect jellyfish numbers. Fishermen need to slowly cut back the amount of fish they are catching to allow the fish population to rebound. Another idea is to cut back on greenhouse gases because it is causing the water in the oceans to become warmer and therefore attracting jellyfish. Some things we could do are not use cars as often, bike to work, or carpool with other people to decrease the number of cars being used. Or perhaps even eat the jellyfish, which has been considered a delicacy in Asia for many years. One solution could be designing a special net so that fishermen could catch jellyfish as well as fish. This problem is not going to go away anytime soon, so we have to find a solution before our oceans are completely taken over by jellyfish.

Works Cited
Grescoe, Taras. “How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 Feb. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/opinion/20grescoe.html?searchResultPosition=4.
Guilford, Gwynn. “Jellyfish Are Taking over the Seas, and It Might Be Too Late to Stop Them.” Quartz, Quartz, 3 June 2014, qz.com/133251/jellyfish-are-taking-over-the-seas-and-it-might-be-too-late-to-stop-them/.
“Jellyfish Overpopulation – A Threat To The Oceans?” Marine Science Today, 22 Jan. 2014, marinesciencetoday.com/2009/06/11/jellyfish-overpopulation-a-threat-to-the-oceans/.
“Solutions to the Problem.” My Green Life-
The Invasion of Jellyfish, mygreenlifebbv.weebly.com/solutions-to-the-problem.html.