Increasing jellyfish populations: trends in Large Marine Ecosystems

By Lucas Brotz, Wwl Cheung, K. Kleisner, E. Pakhomov, Daniel Pauly. Hydrobiologia, 2012

474 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although there are various indications and claims that jellyfish (i.e., scyphozoans, cubozoans, most hydrozoans, ctenophores, and salps) have been increasing at a global scale in recent decades, a rigorous demonstration of this has never been presented. Because this is mainly due to scarcity of quantitative time series of jellyfish abundance from scientific surveys, we attempt to complement such data with non-conventional information from other sources. This was accomplished using the analytical framework of fuzzy logic, which allows the combination of information with variable degrees of cardinality, reliability, and temporal and spatial coverage. Data were aggregated and analyzed at the scale of Large Marine Ecosystem (LME). Of the 66 LMEs defined thus far that cover the world’s coastal waters and seas, trends of jellyfish abundance after 1950 (increasing, decreasing, or stable/variable) were identified for 45, with variable degrees of confidence. Of those 45 LMEs, the majority (28 or 62%) showed increasing trends. These changes are discussed in the context of possible sources of bias and uncertainty, along with previously proposed hypotheses to explain increases in jellyfish.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c900e31c3c7f8966525f35d9e5f257c75bc361b5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Oceanography

In Paleontology

Citations in the corpus

Jellyfish fisheries in the Americas: origin, state of the art, and perspectives on new fishing grounds (2017, unknown): “As jellyfish populations are increasing in many areas of the world (Brotz et al. 2012), it is likely that humans will look for new ways to exploit them.”
Upside-Down but Headed in the Right Direction: Review of the Highly Versatile Cassiopea xamachana System (2018, background): “With the frequency of these events potentially increasing according to studies on climate change (Richardson et al., 2009; Brotz et al., 2012), it necessitates development of methods for accurate taxonomic identification of cryptic species.”
Beyond the jellyfish joyride and global oscillations: advancing jellyfish research (2013, background): “Unfortunately, much of the historical information on jellyfish is anecdotal and one of the great advances engendered by the debate has been the bringing together of available information (Brotz et al., 2012; Condon et al., 2012).”
Gelatinous zooplankton biomass in the global oceans: geographic variation and environmental drivers (2014, background): “A recent study has reported increases in regional and global populations of GZ over decadal time-scales (Brotz et al., 2012), although Condon et al. (2013) suggest that GZ blooms display predictable periodic or decadal fluctuations rather than a sustained monotonic increase.”
Jellyfish populations in the Mediterranean Sea (2012, background): “It is clear that there presently could be no such consensus, given the scarcity of jellyfish time-series data and papers analyzing them (but see BROTz et al. , 2012) .”
The trophodynamics of marine top predators: Current knowledge, recent advances and challenges (2015, background): “Increasing evidence suggests that the biomass of gelatinous organism has been on the rise globally (Brotz et al., 2012; Hay, 2006; Purcell et al., 2007).”