Poisonous Jellyfish Swamping Beaches From Azores To Italy

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An unprecedented invasion of poisonous jellyfish is sweeping southern Europe, heralding a potentially irreversible shift in the marine ecology of the Mediterranean, scientists warned this week. The plague - described by one leading environmental campaigner as " spectacular" - stretches from the Azores in the Atlantic to the Ligurian Sea off the coast of Italy, and is largely the product of what we are doing to the marine environment, biologists say.

Overfishing in ever warmer and more polluted waters has produced an attractive habitat for all sorts of jellyfish which have crowded the Mediterranean this summer. The result, for Britons bathing off the sea's beaches, has been painful. The undulating, glutinous creatures with their trailing poisonous tentacles have stung thousands of holiday-makers in recent weeks, and Costa hoteliers say anxious visitors are shunning Spanish beaches in consequence.

This year the Spanish Red Cross has treated up to 15,000 people for jellyfish stings, nearly twice the number treated in the whole of 2004. In July, more than 6,000 were stung; a swimming race in Alicante led to 200 of the 500 contestants being stung; and, only last Thursday, four tons of stranded jellyfish were carted from the beach at Marbella on the Costa del Sol.

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Climate change is partly to blame: lack of rain has meant a shortage of cold fresh water entering the sea from rivers, producing a warmer, saltier sea which jellyfish like. Human sewage, and fertilisers from intensive farming along the Mediterranean coast, produce a rich soup of nitrogen and phosphates which jellyfish also like. Prevailing winds have helped push the creatures landwards. Meanwhile, their natural predators, larger fish and crustaceans, have all but vanished from the deep, decimated by overfishing. And marine turtles - their main predator - are threatened with extinction as the beaches where they lay their eggs, from Asia to Latin America, are ravaged by tourism.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article305774.ece