We Will Have To Learn To Love Jellyfish

Much of the CO2 we're pouring into the atmosphere ends up being absorbed in our ocean.  Actually most of it.  And this has terrible implications for sea life.  It has happened before.  At the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum we had the greatest extinction of sea life in the history of the planet. And this was the result of CO2 and methane being pumped into the atmosphere and thus the oceans.  And what we're doing now is ten times what happened then.

What we can expect is the loss of much of our sea life.  Except for one, the jelly fish.  Jelly fish will thrive under these conditions.  Interestingly jellyfish will have no problem, and may even become a main food source.

And they're coming to terms with this in Italy.

While tourists throughout Europe seek out Apulia, in Italy’s southeast, for its Baroque whitewashed cities and crystalline seas, swarms of jellyfish are also thronging to its waters.

And not just in Italy.

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

Interestingly, jelly fish are edible, and Italian chefs are working on that.

Antonella Leone is a researcher at Italy’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, and since about two months ago, Dr. Piraino’s wife. At their wedding this summer, the couple celebrated with a tiered cake dripping with confectionary jellyfish.

A leader of the Go Jelly project, she thinks that Italians, with their zeal for locally sourced regional ingredients, might just find a taste for jellyfish.

Others already have. The Japanese serve them sashimi style in strips with soy sauce, and the Chinese have eaten them for a millennium.

I love raw oysters.  My grandchildren will have to consider sashimi jelly fish.

Another cook then slid the slices through a flour batter and dropped them in a fryer. Once plated, they broke free of their casing and insolently stuck out like purple tongues.

Dr. Piraino cut a piece that he said was full of protein and omega-3 fatty acids.
“It’s great,” he said, as it slipped out of his hand.

The chef marinated a piece in garlic and basil for the grill. He prepared another on a bed of arugula next to a sweet fig to balance out what everyone agreed was an intense saltiness.

At the end of the tasting, there were several untouched specimens on the table. Dr. Leone packed the foodstuff of the globally warmed future into a jellyfish doggy bag.

“It’s for my colleagues,” she said. “They are a little skeptical.”