How Jellyfish Poop Fouls Up the Food Chain

April showers bring May flowers, but April pollution brings May jellyfish "blooms." The sudden, seasonal appearance of thousands of the creatures occurs in waters warmed by climate change and in areas where overfishing has removed the food competition for invasive jellies. To study how these blooms affect ocean food chains, researchers examined two species of jellyfish that bloom in the Chesapeake Bay every summer. When these jellyfish dine on zooplankton and other carbon-fixing organisms, they convert the food into a gelatinous, carbon-rich excretion. A few, normally rare species of bacteria quickly eat this waste and convert its carbon into CO₂, the researchers report online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today. This removes the carbon from the waters, preventing fish and other organisms from using it as a food source, ultimately starving out some sea life.

四月的阵雨带来五月的花卉，但是四月污染可能会带来水母数量的激增。成千上万的水母往往季节性地突然出现在由于气候变化而变暖的水域，或者出现在由于过度捕捞使入侵的水母失去食物竞争对手的海域。为了研究水母的激增是如何影响海洋食物链的，研究人员仔细观察了每年夏季在切萨皮克湾突然出现的两种水母。今天，研究人员在《美国国家科学院院刊》在线版上报道说：当水母吃了浮游动物和其他富碳有机物之后，它们将食物变成转化为胶状的富碳粪便，几种平时罕见的细菌很快吃掉这些粪便，将粪便转化为二氧化碳。这样，这些水域中的碳被清除掉，其他鱼类和其他有机体无法利用碳来作为食物源，最终一些海洋生物就会因为饥饿而大量减少。

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