14 DAY TRIAL // A few weeks ago, a swarm of moon jellyfish swam up some pipes at a nuclear plant in Sweden and blocked them. Since these pipes were the ones carrying water used to cool the facility's turbines, workers were left with no choice except suspend activities until the jellyfish were removed from inside the pipes.
By the looks of it, several researchers believe that, at some point in the future, such incidents will become fairly common, and that jellyfish have the potential to become a more serious problem than anyone would expect them do, given the fact that they have no brain and are mainly made up of water.
Daily Mail tells us that, according to an investigation carried out by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada, jellyfish populations in several parts of the world, i.e. East Asia, the Black Sea, Hawaii and Antarctica, have increased to a considerable extent.
In time, this could lead to the formation of many large swarms of jellyfish that have the potential to affect large coastal structures much like the moon jellyfish did with the nuclear plant in Sweden.
Researchers say that, according to evidence at hand, this boom in the world's jellyfish population must be linked to the fact that human activities have affected the balance of marine ecosystems.
Thus, pollution and overfishing are likely to have triggered a drop in the number of sea creatures known to feed on jellyfish, therefore allowing the latter to breed more effectively than they did in the past.