A jellyfish invasion might not be on your Doomsday Bingo Card , but it believably should be . They ’re a long way of life from seize the res publica , but below the sea surface , a warfare is already remonstrate . Fortunately , an unlikely Cuban sandwich stands between our ocean and a full jelly takeover : the humblesea polo-neck .
see inside a polo-neck ’s sassing and you get some idea as to what makes these bozo such efficient Portuguese man-of-war assassins . If you ’re doubting that a dieting of floating blob can amount to much , just look at the tremendous leatherback , Dermochelys coriacea .
The Dermochelys coriacea polo-neck eats almost exclusively jellyfish and yet can weigh between 250 and 907 kg ( 550 and 2,000 pounds ) , touch lengths of up to 1.8 meters ( 6 feet ) . They ’re able to slurp up jellies like the sting predatorylion ’s manewith the economic aid of a nightmarish exercise set of backward - manoeuver spine that mean once something depart in , it does n’t come in out .
A leatherback’s esophagus is not a good place to find yourself.Image credit: Mdomingoa,CC BY-SA 4.0, viaWikimedia Commons
leatherback can eat 16,000 calories worth of jellyfish a day , reportsNational Geographic , accounting for around 73 percentage of their body weight unit . A compounding of abundance and simpleness make jellyfish a sustainable dieting as the turtles have a 100 percent succeeder rate hunting them , take in around1,000 metric tonsof jellies over their 50 - class lifespan .
And a upright affair , too , because jellyfish are getting worryingly close to taking over .
In an eye - openingTED - Ed living , Mariela Pajuelo and Javier Antonio Quinones demonstrate the crucial role ocean turtles spiel in preventing Portuguese man-of-war from dominating the ocean . Why would such a coup be a job ? Because jellyfish are outstandingly voracious predators .
Larvae , eggs , small fish , and crustacean are all on the computer menu , and they can outcompete larger species by consuming all the resources they need to pull round . In component of the human beings , they ’ve even ground human operations to a hitch , such as in Sweden where a swarm of lunation jellies foul the pipe of a nuclear reactor – one of the world ’s largest – force it to shut out down .
“ If affair rest on their current flight , we could be head for a hereafter where the entire ocean is compact with jellyfish , ” says the TED - Ed storyteller .
The power that makes leatherbacks and other turtles the perfect challenger for jellyfish is that they are immune to their attack and defence strategy . Jellyfish have tentacles cover in cnidocytes that throng venomous harpoons call nematocysts that are release when they descend into contact with foe or solid food , stinging and even sometimes paralyze them .
It ’s no good on turtleneck because they ’re protect by scale made up of keratin , which is the same thing our nails are made of . The backward - facing spines in that demonic mouth we note earlier are also made of keratin , so the jellyfish ’s stinging is as useless inside the leatherback as it is out .
Even with leatherbacks eating a wonderful piano ’s Charles Frederick Worth of jellyfish every day , they are face an uphill conflict because jellyfish can reproduce asexually as well as sexually , and sometimes inenormous heyday . Humans are n’t helping here , as our fertilizer runoff from land can increase their rates of reproduction , making an even bigger job for our leatherback turtle . Add to that the sportfishing practice session that , in some parts of the ocean , have been push polo-neck species to extinction , and it ’s easy to see where we ’re going wrong .
If we want leatherback turtles to come to our rescue , first we need to come to theirs and recognizethe importance of predator in an ecosystem .
