“Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean”: A non-­‐fiction book proposal by Rhett Register A PROJECT Submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science September 2011 Register 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank his advisor, Joseph Cone, for his guidance and the opportunity to create this proposal as well as committee members, Carmel Finley and Richard Brodeur, for their advice and support throughout this process. He also extends thanks to COAS personnel, past and present, who provided the encouragement, access, and funding that lead to the completion of this project. Register Acknowledgements 2 ABSTRACT Title: “Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean”: A non-­‐fiction book proposal Jellyfish benefit from many of the changes mankind is making to the ocean. Climate change, overfishing, nutrient runoff, the introduction of invasive species, and coastal development all promote these ancient, gelatinous creatures. Because of their familiarity to readers and affinity for degraded places in the ocean, jellyfish are used to illustrate anthropogenic alterations to the marine environment. Register Abstract 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Section 1. Introduction 5 Section 2. Book Overview 10 Section 3. Chapter Summaries 13 Section 4. Writing Sample: “Introduction” 22 Section 5. Writing Sample: “Chapter 7: Jellyfishing in America” 25 Section 6. Market Analysis 39 Section 7. Query Letter 41 Section 8. Submission Timeline 42 Section 9. Lessons Learned 43 References 45 Register Table of Contents 4 Section 1 Introduction 1.1 Rationale for a book about jellyfish blooms The ocean is vital to life on Earth. It helps maintain global temperatures within the narrow window of human tolerance; it produces oxygen and stores carbon. The ocean influences climate and weather, and provides food. It supports a wide range of industries such as fishing, transportation, aquaculture, and tourism and is increasingly becoming a source of power generation. Humans, both coastal dwellers and those that live inland, affect the ocean in ways that they may not be aware of. Coastal dwellers discharge sewage and runoff directly to the ocean; they harvest ocean products and modify coastal features. People that live inland, though they may seldom visit it, still alter the ocean through the burning of fossil fuels and the application of chemicals which eventually end up in the ocean. What foods and products they buy indirectly affect the ocean as well. A cumulative result of these effects is that biodiversity within ocean ecosystems has plummeted (Worm et al., 2006), the oceans have become more acidic (Orr et al., 2005; Fabry et al., 2008) and warmer (Barnett et al., 2005), and the number of hypoxic areas has increased (Diaz & Rosenberg, 2008). In response to these changes, numerous review bodies, including the Pew Oceans Commission (2003) and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (2004), have released reports which, among other things, call for an increase in the level of ocean understanding by the general populace. On July 19, 2010, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13547 which established the first comprehensive ocean management policy in United States history. The order signed into law the recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force and created the National Ocean Council to oversee its implementation. Section (a) (x) of the order declares: 5 Register [I]t is the policy of the United States to foster a public understanding of the value of the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes to build a foundation for improved stewardship. Prior to the signing of Executive Order 13547, many states had already heeded the suggestions put forward by the two commission reports and others like them. The Pacific states of Washington, California, and Oregon signed the West Coast Governors’ Agreement on Ocean Health, an agreement between the states that incorporates many of the suggestions put forward by the Pew Oceans Committee and U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy reports including calls for increased ocean awareness and literacy. In an effort to assess the current level of ocean literacy among U.S. citizens and to determine the best vehicles for increasing it, Steel et al. (2005) sent out a survey of basic ocean knowledge to a random sample of 1,233 people. The researchers found a positive correlation between ocean policy relevant knowledge and the reading of newspapers and the Internet. Radio and television, they found, showed a negative correlation. This divide seems to fall along the lines of how the information is acquired with active acquisition (i.e., reading) favored over passive (i.e., listening or watching). Steel et al. (2005) conclude that people need to actually experience coastal problems before they are likely to change their views but not everyone can visit the coast or have access to marine exhibits. Therefore, in lieu of direct exposure to the marine environment, the media still has a major role to play in fostering ocean literacy among the populace. This project looks at general audience science books as one possible media vehicle for promoting ocean literacy. Weigold (2001) notes general audience science books are an understudied, potentially large, contributor to science understanding by the mainstream public. Among science books for adult readers, one specialized format is the natural history that focuses on an individual species. While there is no agreed upon name for this natural history sub-­‐genre, these types of books are sometimes referred to as microhistories or micro-­‐natural histories by their publishers. One of the first of these for a general audience was John McPhee’s, 6 Register Oranges (1963). In it the fruit serves as a touchstone for numerous stories that tell the picture of a state transitioning from rural to urban and experiencing profound changes in cultural mores. The seminal work of this type for the marine environment is Mark Kurlansky’s, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997). Like Oranges, this book takes a single species, in this case a fish, and tells the human story of religion, revolution, exploration, slavery, and the establishment of the New England fishing industry. Following the example of these books, Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean will use these unique, terrifying, and beautiful organisms to tell the story of the current state of the global ocean. By travelling to where jellyfish are a problem, the book will highlight the changes that are taking place in the ocean, and in telling why the jellyfish dominate a particular area, it will examine some of what is causing those changes. That jellies thrive in regions of the ocean that people have altered and that they cause such a response in humans, means that, like Kurlansky’s codfish and McPhee’s oranges, jellyfish have the potential to tell a larger story. In telling that story, Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean is a direct response to the recent call for increased ocean literacy. 7 Register 1.2 Methodology I collected the information for this project over a period of two years (2009-­‐2011) and conducted interviews between fall 2010 and spring 2011. Additional personal communication (e.g., follow-­‐up interviews with fishermen and government officials in the Georgia Department of Natural Resources) took place in the summer of 2011. The research methodology involved three iterative and interconnected processes: 1) A review of the scientific literature, gray literature, literature on local and national policy, and fishery statistics documentation 2) A review of media accounts of jellyfish activities 3) Interviews with scientists, fishermen, and government officials 1.2.1 Review of scientific literature I reviewed the scientific literature on jellyfish to find areas where changes in jellyfish numbers have occurred, correlations between man’s actions and jellyfish numbers, jellyfish life history strategies that allow them to benefit from degraded areas, impacts of jellyfish blooms (e.g., to tourism, power generation, fishing), and on specific problem species. I also consulted literature when searching for scientists and organizations involved in jellyfish research. These served as the first points of contact when beginning the interview process. A review of the literature also showed that certain places reoccur in the literature as illustrative of a specific problem. For example, the Benguela Current off of Namibia, certainly subject to all of the factors that promote jellyfish proliferation, is often used to show the effects of overfishing. These reoccurring examples (e.g., Sea of Japan, Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Gulf of Mexico, Bering Sea) have become the foci of the book. 8 Register 1.2.2 Review of media reports and non-­‐academic sources In addition to scientific literature, media reports were reviewed. A search of major world publications in the LexisNexis database for the term “jellyfish” reveals more than 2000 articles containing that term have been published since 2009. The review showed a number of ways that jellyfish are portrayed in the media and offered numerous examples of effective and ineffective treatments of the subject. Media reports also offer entre into regions that are experiencing trouble with jellyfish through descriptions of people whose lives are disrupted by them (e.g., fishermen, aquaculturists, power plant workers). After reading a story in the Savannah Morning News, I contacted and eventually interviewed the Georgia fishermen that were the subject of that article for the writing sample portion of this proposal. 1.2.3 Interviews Interviews ranged from thirty minutes to multiple days. In most instances, the interviews were person-­‐to-­‐person though at least two interviews involved three or more people. When possible, interviews were conducted in person at the workplace of the interviewee or in a location convenient to them. When not possible, they were conducted over the telephone. In some cases, follow-­‐up questions were asked via email. The majority of the interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. To obtain additional direction and data necessary for this project, I conducted several informal consultations with public officials in person, over the telephone or via email. Consultations occurred with individuals in the following organizations: National Marine Fisheries Service, Oregon Coast Aquarium, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratories, McIntosh County Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, University of Georgia, University of Alabama, Oregon State University, Oregon Sea Grant, and the NCEAS Global Jellyfish Blooms Working Group. 9 Register Section 2 Book Overview Jellyfish are making a comeback. During the early Cambrian period, 500 million years ago, jellyfish were the pinnacle of food gathering technology. They were the first animals to leave the benthos and navigate the water column. But as the seas changed, creatures with new adaptations such as jaws and eyes usurped the jellyfish’s role as apex predator. Now, through the substantial alterations we are making to the ocean environment, humans are helping to reestablish jellies as king of the seas. Today, many coastal regions are experiencing surges in jellyfish numbers. Blooms—large aggregations of jellyfish—are increasing in frequency and extent in places like the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists link changes in jellyfish numbers with changes that man is making to the ocean. These alterations include overfishing, climate change, nutrient runoff, increased coastal development, and translocation of invasive species. Overfishing removes competitors such as anchovies and sardines that vie with jellies for zooplankton. It also removes animals such as chum salmon that prey on jellies. Removing both competitors and predators of jellyfish paves the way for increased jellyfish numbers. Once established in an ecosystem, jellies have the potential to “cap” a fishery by preying upon fish eggs and juveniles as well as continuing to compete with them for food. This “jellyfish spiral” where jellyfish dominate an ecosystem that was once dominated by fish has occurred off of the coast of West Africa. In the Benguela Current off of Namibia the biomass of jellies far outweighs that of fish. Decades of overfishing by a fleet of international trawlers removed the anchovies and sardines that once made this region the second-­‐most productive fishery in the world after the anchovy fishery off of South America. In a country that measures rainfall in millimeters, the loss of this resource is a crippling blow that forces Namibians to resort to unsustainable and environmentally destructive means of livelihood such as mining. In America’s “fish basket”—the hugely productive, nutrient-­‐rich waters cupped by the curve of the Aleutian Islands off of the coast of Alaska—large swaths of the sea periodically become 10 Register unfishable due to jellyfish blooms. Fishermen call it the “Slime Bank” and avoid it as it clogs nets and damages catches. Worldwide, ocean waters are warming and becoming more acidic due to the burning of fossil fuels. Warmer waters in the Bering Sea are the probable cause of these massive accumulations though scientists do not yet fully understand the mechanism. Every summer since 2000, Shin-­‐ichi Uye and his students ride the ferry from Japan to Korea counting the jellyfish that pour by. These jellyfish, the world’s largest, have become a seasonal feature in the waters surrounding Japan. In 2005 he and his students calculated that between 300 to 500 million of the enormous jellies, some reaching weights of 450 pounds and diameters of 6 ½ feet, were streaming through the Tsushima Straights into the Sea of Japan every day. Uye believes the jellies originate in China’s Yellow Sea and that changes there, such as increased coastal development, promote the blooms of these massive creatures. Extreme increases in jellies afflict the Gulf of Mexico as well. Monty Graham, a marine biologist at the University of Alabama’s Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has said that in some years jellies are so numerous that it is like they form a net from one side of the Gulf to the other. One factor that promotes jellies in the Gulf is the “dead zone” that forms at the mouth of the Mississippi River every summer. Jellies benefit twice from this man-­‐made occurrence caused primarily by excess nutrients from agriculture. First they gorge on the food that arrives with the phytoplankton bloom. Jellyfish are able to incorporate more food and grow faster than vertebrates. Then, as the unused portion of the bloom sinks and decays, the rotting organic matter clouds the water and the bacteria that decomposes it reduce the available oxygen. Jellyfish thrive in these turbid, oxygen-­‐poor waters because they have roughly half the oxygen requirements of fish and hunt by feel rather than sight. Finally, as global trade has increased, so has the number of ships hauling goods around the world. After loading, freighters draw onboard thousands of gallons of water to balance the weight above deck. When they drop off their cargo, sometimes thousands of miles away, they discharge the ballast water as well as the creatures that live in it. In this way, the hardy jellyfish has established itself in numerous areas throughout the world. In the 1980’s, the Black Sea experienced a bloom of comb jellies that put fishermen from six countries out of work. 11 Register Researches traced its introduction to ballast water discharged from a freighter originating in the southeastern Unites States. Ten years later, another accidental introduction of comb jellies predated on the first and now both species are firmly established in the system. Overfishing, a changing climate, nutrient runoff, increasing coastal development, and translocation of invasive species all are increasing and all promote jellies. These creatures, designed for a prehistoric ocean, are feeling at home in the contemporary oceans humans are modifying. This book looks at the possibility that we are knocking the oceans back to a more primitive state, one that has less oxygen, is warmer, more acidic, and is less biodiverse, in short, an ocean that may once again be dominated by jellyfish. 12 Register Section 3 Chapter Summaries I originally conceived of the book as a series of magazine-­‐style articles all centered on the topic of jellyfish. But as I researched and began to write, a clearer argument took shape – that is, that humans are pushing the oceans back to a more primitive state, a state that resembles the oceans when they were first dominated by jellyfish. A random assortment of articles began to seem potentially confusing and uninteresting to the reader. Franklin (1986) notes that a “complication/resolution” framework can provide effective means for maintaining the reader’s interest throughout a story. He argues that the movement from complication to resolution of that complication maintains tension and that tension maintains reader interest. Following his advice, and after numerous conversations with my advisor, Joe Cone, I have altered the order of the chapters in an effort to create a clearer storyline and maintain tension (and hopefully reader interest) throughout the book. The complication/resolution structure that Franklin describes provides structure to the story on two levels – within each individual chapter and in how the chapters are ordered. Both chapters and book introduce, near the beginning, a complicating situation. For example, in the chapter on the overfished Benguela Current off of Namibia, the complicating situation is that the arid country’s one renewable resource, fishing, has been altered and now produces more jellyfish than fish. The development of the story shows Namibians moving away from fishing toward non-­‐renewable resource extraction, attempting agriculture or leaving. Similarly, at the book level, the first six chapters together introduce the larger complication that our actions towards the ocean are making it a better place for jellyfish, a creature that causes a multitude of problems for humans. Rather than ending on a dour note (something Franklin advises against), both the chapters and the book as a whole move on to emphasize the successes that could potentially resolve the complication. In the Namibian story, the Namibian government, with the help of the Norway based Developing Countries Fisheries Research Program, establishes a robust fisheries management organization that is working to heal the fishery. Similarly, after the first six 13 Register chapters show the problems associated with jellyfish, chapter seven shifts the focus of the book away from the complications jellyfish blooms present and begins to look at possible solutions. These conditions range from the use of citizen science to monitor jellyfish numbers in the Mediterranean to policies that regulate fertilizer use. Deciding on chapter content and order has been a highly iterative process. Going from the initial unstructured assortment of chapters to the current complication/resolution model has involved more than ten different chapter order revisions. I am convinced that it will continue to change as the chapters are written and lend themselves to other places in the order. Initial Chapter Order Current Chapter Order NCEAS jellyfish bloom working group Introduction Gulf of Mexico Jellyfish Fossils Jellyfishing in America Sea of Japan Jellyfish as Food Jellyfish in the Aquarium Jellyfish in the Aquarium Gulf of Mexico Namibia Mediterranean and Black Seas Mediterranean and Black Seas Namibia Sea of Japan Australia and the Bering Sea Bering Sea and Australia Jellyfishing in America Jellyfish in Sci., Industry, and Medicine Synthesis -­‐ what might the future hold? Table 1. Differences between the original chapter order and the current order include: Blending the “NCEAS jellyfish bloom working group” chapter with “Gulf of Mexico,” moving the chapter on jellyfish in public aquariums up to explain jellyfish life histories earlier, moving “Jellyfish as Food” and “Jellyfish in Science, Industry and Medicine” to after the complicating chapters, and introducing a synthesis chapter that pulls together what was learned and points towards ways to resolve the complications introduced by the previous chapters. 14 Register Introduction At a conference in Portland, Oregon, Shin-­‐iche Uye, a researcher at Hiroshima University, stood in front of a projected image of a jellyfish the size of a jet engine. Uye told the audience that blooms—surges in population— of the Giant Nomura’s Jellyfish had only been reported three times in the 20th century but now tens of millions of the stinging, pink globs, some reaching weights of 450 pounds and diameters of 6 and a half feet, were pouring into the Sea of Japan nearly every summer. Speakers following Uye discussed unprecedented blooms of other species occurring in the Mediterranean, the Chesapeake, off shore of Western Africa and in the Bering Sea. I was intrigued. Were jellyfish taking over? This book chronicles my discoveries as I find and examine areas in the ocean where the food web has switched from being dominated by fish to having jellyfish at its apex. While examining this shift, the story takes surprising turns into the world of jellyfish fishing in America, their role as pets and as food, the role of jellyfish in science and medicine, and their impact on ocean policy. As the story progresses, jellyfish serve to show how humans are changing the ocean. This book takes the reader along as I discover a world where instead of sharks and tuna, jellyfish occupy the top of the food chain. The organization of this book centers on the five main anthropogenic actions – overfishing, climate change, nutrient runoff, coastal development and the movement of invasive species – that promote jellyfish. In addition to these main themes, there are supporting chapters which further flesh out the jellyfish story – detailing their myriad uses by society which range from food to pets to genetic markers. For each of the actions, I visit a corresponding region of the world where jellyfish are an issue. By diving and speaking with fishermen and managers, surfers and victims, we come away with an understanding of the direction the world’s oceans can take if we don’t examine and alter how we use them. 15 Register Chapter One In a field of switchgrass periodically punctuated by slabs of sandstone, we join Whitey Hagadorn in his search for jellyfish. Hagadorn, a geologist with Amherst College, is a specialist in fossils of soft-­‐bodied creatures including the jellyfish. The Potsdam Sandstone formation near Plattsburgh, New York, is one of the few places in the world where large numbers of fossilized jellies can be found. When we locate one, a slightly convex knob atop a weed-­‐covered outcropping, Hagadorn paints a picture of the prehistoric seas that were its home. Parallels are drawn between the oceans he describes and the oceans we see today. This section poses the book’s central question: Are we knocking the ocean back, through large-­‐scale changes, to an earlier, less diverse, more primitive state – one that favors jellyfish? Chapter Two From the fields of upstate New York to the Sea of Japan, we visit a place where changing ocean conditions have completely altered the ecology of a country’s near-­‐shore waters. In the 20th century, Japanese fisheries records show three instances of blooms of the echizen kurage or Giant Nomura’s jellyfish. Since 2000, the jellies have been appearing almost every year. These behemoths frustrate fishermen by crushing and stinging their catch, making the fish unsuitable for sale. Sometimes crewmembers have to don SCUBA gear to cut nets that are clogged with the massive jellies. We visit with the captain and crew of the Daisan Shinsho Maru, a fishing vessel that in 2009 capsized in calm seas off of the coast of Chiba Prefecture while trying to pull in nets overfull with the gigantic jellies. We meet up with Shin-­‐ichi Uye a scientist at Hiroshima University who specializes in studying the Giant Nomura’s and who was the first to piece together their complex life history in the lab. We join him on a survey trip crossing the Tsushima Straits between Japan and Korea and learn that the jellies originate in China’s Yellow Sea. Uye believes that changes there such as increased aquaculture effort and coastal construction are a large part of why these jellies are blooming more frequently. 16 Register Chapter Three This chapter shows why jellyfish are uniquely suited to capitalize on an ocean changed by man. We go behind the scenes of the Oregon Coast Aquarium where Evonne Mochon Collura, the resident jellyfish expert, explains the life history of jellyfish. These “brainless prima donnas” as she calls them turn out to be surprisingly complex. Through a tour of the various tanks and growout facilities, the reader learns about the multi-­‐stage life history of jellyfish. We see plates on which their nearly microscopic, asexual, polyp phase can sit for months or years waiting for optimal conditions before moving on to the next phase of their life cycle—the conditions that Collura can create in the lab and that humans are increasingly creating in the ocean. Here we learn interesting biological facts about jellyfish including how a cnidocyte—the jellyfish stinging cell—works. We learn that some nudibranchs, or sea slugs, eat jellyfish and steal these cells for their own use as weaponry. We learn about jellyfish’s natural predators and their place in the food web. We find that many jellyfish bio-­‐luminesce. Scientists are finding through genetic analysis that the evolutionary path of jellyfish is different than previously thought and that describing their nervous system simply as a nerve net is a “textbook oversimplification.” Finally, we learn that some jellyfish species have well developed eyes and are active predators. Perhaps we underestimated the humble jellyfish. Chapter Four The scene changes to Santa Barbara, California, where the Global Jellyfish Blooms Working Group, a group of international jellyfish researchers, is having the final meeting of a two-­‐year attempt to understand global jellyfish populations. This chapter contains interviews with Shin-­‐
iche Uye from Hiroshima University and Monty Graham, from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. It illustrates how jellies might be used as a gauge for ocean health as well as the difficulties involved in counting them. It gives an overview of the causes and consequences of increased jellyfish blooms. Scientists from the working group will be consulted throughout the book. 17 Register Chapter Five After the meeting in Santa Barbara, we follow Graham to his lab in Alabama to learn about “dead zones”—regions in the ocean where nutrient-­‐rich runoff, mostly from agriculture, create an area that few higher level organisms can inhabit. One of the creatures that can live in dead zones is, of course, jellyfish. We learn how these areas at the mouths of many river systems are increasing in number and extent. With their low oxygen requirements, ability to hunt by feel and rapidly take advantage of available food, jellyfish are uniquely suited to capitalize on “dead zones.” The author dives with Graham’s team and accompanies them on a jellyfish identification and count surveys to illustrate these areas. Chapter Six From the Yellow Sea to the hold of a transoceanic freighter, we examine how jellyfish hitchhike on ships and are deposited into new areas around the world. This chapter describes episodes of repeated introductions of nonnative jellyfish in the Black Sea and other areas. We hear from scientists monitoring non-­‐indigenous species in the Mediterranean and learn about initiatives that use citizen science to try and get a handle on rapid changes taking place there. We hear from tourism officials that are frantic to remove the jellies that scare off tourists. Methods they employ to clear their beaches of jellyfish range from laborious to poisonous. Some deploy stinger nets to keep out the jellies, armies of people to net them out, and some even use poisons in an attempt to kill them. 18 Register Chapter Seven The Benguela Current off of the Namibian Coast is an illustration of the destructive nature of overfishing and the shift that can occur from a fish to a jellyfish-­‐dominated regime. Jellies benefit from the removal of predators and competitors that indiscriminate fishing provides. Once established, they consume juvenile fish and eggs, compete with fish for food, and sometimes prevent recovery of stocks. The Benguela system off of Namibia now has a biomass of jellyfish that exceeds the biomass of vertebrates. This was not always the case. The Benguela Current, which comes ashore off of South Africa and moves northward past Namibia and the southern portion of Angola, was once described as the most productive region of the world behind the Humboldt Current off of South America. After 200 years of colonial rule, Namibia finally gained its independence in 1990. One of the first actions of the fledgling Namibian government was to declare a 200-­‐mile Exclusive Economic Zone off of their coast. They confiscated encroaching vessels including seven foreign industrial fishing boats and nearly one million dollars’ worth of their catch. But it was too late. What was once a vibrant fishery had been decimated by years of overfishing by international trawlers. Despite receiving a damaged fishery, Namibia is seen as an example of good fisheries management. Why then are they facing such a problem with jellies? To find out, we speak with Namibian fishery managers and scientists that are studying the ecosystem to determine if the change is permanent or if the system can be returned to its former condition. Chapter Eight In the vast Bering Sea we watch curtains of sea nettles through a live video feed coming in from a remotely operated vehicle used in a survey. We speak with scientists that are studying changes in this highly productive fishery zone and examine the hypothesis that warming of the 19 Register water due to climate change promotes jellyfish blooms. From there we travel to north Australia where warming waters have pushed the range of the potentially lethal box jelly further south to more populous areas. We talk with the people that are in charge of protecting the public, victims and surfers as well as the scientists that study these amazing creatures. Chapter Nine In this chapter, jellyfish switch from being a nuisance to being a delicacy. We visit Lucky Strike Sichuan Restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where owner Rita You serves a spicy jellyfish salad that is based on a recipe from her native Sichuan Province in China. The dish arrives and consists of strips of opaque jellyfish tossed with red peppers and what You calls Chinese celery—a strongly vegetative green that cuts through the salt and oil. Jellyfish turns out to be tasty with a vaguely cartilaginous crunch. From Portland, we visit Darien, Georgia, where we ride with fisherman Howell Boone who is capitalizing on increased jellyfish numbers. “We’re seeing more now than we ever have,” he says about the cannonball jellyfish that he pursues. Originally a shrimper, Boone now spends a part of every year fishing for jellyfish. This chapter explores the question of why some Georgia shrimpers are now supplementing their income catching jellyfish, a creature they once considered a nuisance. We pose the question of whether catching jellyfish is illustrative of what Daniel Pauly, a well-­‐known marine ecologist, calls “fishing down the marine food web” where higher trophic level creatures that were once the staple of the industry are diminished and only lower trophic level species such as jellyfish remain. We also meet Terry Chuang, currently America’s only processor of jellyfish, and learn how jellyfish are processed and what the market is for them. 20 Register Chapter Ten In this chapter we will hear from researchers that have found inspiration in and from jellyfish. In 2008 Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien won the Nobel Prize for their discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) that is naturally occurring in some types of jellyfish. The marker has many uses in science and medicine including: monitoring the development of nerve cells, learning how cancer cells spread and researching nerve cell damage during Alzheimer's disease. John Dabiri, a researcher at Caltech, looks to jellyfish for lessons in design. His study of jellyfish has resulted in modifications to the ways that buoys, submarines, and some types of windmills function. Chapter Eleven This chapter pulls together what has been learned on this tour of the Earth’s changed seas and hazards a guess for the future. It also reviews steps that have been taken to try and curb damage to the ocean and promote its recovery. Will we be able to preserve the ocean or will we leave it to the jellyfish? 21 Register Section 4 Writing Sample: “Introduction” In 2002, sea monsters invaded Japan. Almost overnight, the Sea of Japan seemed to fill with Nemopilema nomurai—the Giant Nomura’s Jellyfish. Some washing machine-­‐sized and weighing up to 450 pounds, they poured in through the Tsushima Strait between Japan and Korea. Instead of sea bream and hake, Japanese fishermen began bringing up nets full of gelatinous goop. That is, if they could bring them up. Sometimes a crewmember had to don SCUBA gear and splash overboard to cut the nets because they were too laden with jellyfish to lift out of the water. When they were able to land their catch, many of the fish had been crushed or stung to such an extent that they were unmarketable. This was not the first time blooms of Nomura’s had occurred in Asian waters. Three times in the 20th century – 1920, 1958, and 1995 – the giant jellyfish had appeared in large numbers. It was just something that happened from time to time. Since 2002, however, it was occurring nearly every year. *** In 2009, I saw Shin-­‐ichi Uye, a biological oceanographer from Hiroshima University in Japan who studies the Nomura’s jellyfish, speak at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference in Portland, Oregon. Since 2002, he told us, the giant jellyfish had returned every summer but one and extended along the shore of much of Japan. Uye came to Hiroshima University in 1978. There he originally studied copepods, tiny flea-­‐like animals that are the lynchpins of the marine food web and are used to study everything from ocean currents to carbon sequestration. For many years he studied and contributed to the scientific literature on his favorite animal. Starting in the mid-­‐eighties however, the copepod samples he and his team were getting on research cruises began coming up clogged with jellyfish. 22 Register At that time, few people studied jellyfish. They were considered a nuisance and discarded. But if he was having problems with his nets, chances are others might be as well. Because there was little literature on the subject, Uye began to interview fishermen. What he found piqued his curiosity. Almost everyone that he spoke with reported seeing more jellies with each successive year. What was happening with jellyfish? Were they becoming a larger part of the food web? What would that mean to fisheries? Where did they come from? How did they grow and reproduce? There were a lot of questions that no one had answers for. Copepods, he decided, would have to wait. In his presentation at the CERF conference, Uye described his battle against the Nomura’s invasion. Since 2002 he had been able to piece together their complex life cycle. He was the first person to breed them in the lab. He and his students regularly rode international ferries and counted the jellies. He hypothesized that the giant jellyfish were originating in China and were the result of a combination of multiple manmade changes to the Yellow Sea. He was not the only one battling jellies. After his presentation, other researchers described similar situations from around the world. I saw slides of sea nettles—15-­‐foot long jellies streaked with yellow, orange and red and ringed with wicked-­‐looking scarlet tentacles—
from the Chesapeake Bay. The Mediterranean was drowning in clear moon jellies fringed like Victorian lampshades and purple, golf ball-­‐sized mauve singers. Australian jellies transported in by ballast water were invading the Gulf of Mexico. No one knew why they were seeing such dramatic changes in jellyfish populations or how representative they were of larger changes to the ocean. They all agreed that to some extent, changes that humans were making to the ocean were benefitting jellyfish. Overfishing, nutrient runoff, climate change, coastal development, and shipping – jellies seemed to benefit from almost everything man was doing to the ocean on an industrial scale. I left the conference that day with my head spinning. I thought that changes occurring in the ocean, like waters warming from climate change, were supposed to still be off in the future, still preventable. But jellyfish brought home the fact that a changed ocean is not in the future. It is now. 23 Register I knew that fisheries had been crashing since the 1970’s due to overfishing and poor management. But crashing fisheries are theoretical to all but those who work with them. In the grocery store it is easy just to switch to tilapia or chicken if the fish I am looking for is not there. But jellyfish bring the issue of a changed ocean in-­‐shore, close to home. Listening to the researchers, it seemed possible that if we continue to fish, fertilize, develop, dump and change the climate, coastal waters filled with jellyfish might become the new norm. This book is a series of dispatches from the new ocean. It will take us to Japan to dive with the Nomura jellyfish and speak with fishermen and researchers who study them. We will go to Namibia where decades of overfishing by a fleet of international ocean trawlers have left the Namibians with a fishery that is more jelly than fish. We will travel to the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, China and the Mediterranean to explore how jellyfish have changed life there and what these places are doing about their new neighbor. Along the way, we will look at ways of stemming this change and meet people who are finding ways to take advantage of it. Jellyfish luminescence has provided the material for a way to watch cancer grow and observe the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Engineers are studying jellyfish movements and are developing the next generation of heart valves and windmills based on what they have learned. As if to hammer things home, the day after I saw Uye speak, the news contained a short piece from Chiba Prefecture in Japan. It described a 10-­‐ton fishing vessel called the Daisan Shinsho-­‐Maru capsizing in calm seas and throwing its crew into the Pacific. The boat had rolled as the crew tried to bring in a net that was over-­‐filled with Giant Nomura’s jellyfish. 24 Register Section 5 Writing Sample: “Chapter 7: Jellyfishing in America” On an early morning in an already sweltering Georgia May, the Miss Bertha, an 80-­‐foot steel-­‐hulled shrimp boat, follows the outgoing tide away from her home dock in Darien, Georgia. The boat heads east, through a vascular network of creeks and rivers, towards the Atlantic Ocean. As she goes, her wake briefly re-­‐covers recently exposed oyster beds that line the shores of the narrow channel. Fiddler crabs raise an oversized claw and retreat from their scavenging to the safety of the marsh grass. A wood stork, disturbed by the noise from the engine, lifts off from its hunting spot on the muddy banks. The enormous black and white bird ascends out of the marsh and from the back deck Howell Boone and I watch as it slowly makes its way across the cloudless sky like a rower sculling the length of an expansive blue lake. Boone, owner and captain of the Miss Bertha, has invited me to join him for the last few days of this year’s Georgia jellyfish season. In 2009, I heard Daniel Pauly in an interview with Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program, Fresh Air, say that the oceans were in serious decline and that the end result of current fishing practices could be a marine ecosystem dominated by jellyfish. Pauly, arguably the world’s best known marine ecologist, coined the term “fishing down the marine food web”—the process of humans eating their way from top predators like tuna down the food chain to “baitfish” like anchovies. When Terry joked about Americans beginning to eat jellyfish, Pauly assured her it was no joke and predicted that it would be more common as the situation got worse. An article earlier this year in the Savannah Morning News about Georgia shrimpers catching jellyfish brought his words to mind. A generation ago jellyfish were a problem for shrimpers, Boone tells me. They clogged nets and damaged catches. Now shrimpers were actively pursuing the animals they once tried so hard to avoid. Was this Pauly’s prediction being realized? 25 Register *** Though the Miss Bertha is eighty feet long, there is no room on board for a spectator. Boone has me help him search for rips in the curtains of black nylon netting suspended above the deck drying from yesterday’s expedition. “Blacktips, lemons, sands,” he lists the sharks that sometimes come up with the jellyfish and cause the holes we are looking for. He points to the frayed edges of a gap in the mesh that I missed. “If you don’t find them you can lose a whole lot of jellyfish,” he says deftly stitching it closed with a bobbin of nylon line. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources calls it an “experimental fishery” and federal agencies do not recognize it at all. But the cannonball jellyfish fishery has been happening every spring since 2002. It is small—the Miss Bertha is one of only five boats permitted to fish for jellyfish or “jellyballs” as they are called around here. But the fleet ranges far. They travel as far north as Edisto, South Carolina, and south all the way down to St. Augustine, Florida—a one-­‐way trip of 16 hours. Federal and state laws stipulate that catch data is confidential if there are less than three entities – fishermen or processors – in a fishery. Because of that, catch data for jellyfish are unavailable. Last year, however, Boone bought the Miss Bertha and refitted her as a full-­‐
time jellyballer, so he is confident that the fishery has a future. Having finished net repair, I follow Boone into the galley where he hands me a fried chicken biscuit smeared with the contents of a packet of grape jam. Over sweating styrofoam cups of sweet tea he tells me about catching jellies for a living. “We’re seeing more now then we ever have,” he said. “And the season is lasting longer.” Howell, gray hair parted and flattened by a faded baseball cap, eyes perpetually squinting against the glare on the water, stops our conversation from time to time to cock his head and 26 Register listen to some slight variation in the constant white noise from the massive 12-­‐cylinder Chevy diesel that propels us. He is a dynamo. Today I will see him splice a snapped cable, repair a broken hydraulic line, fillet a shark and fry it on choppy seas (he wraps a length of heavy chain around the base of the iron skillet so the boiling oil doesn’t slide off and ignite the galley) and find nearly 60,000 pounds of jellyfish in the open ocean. Miss Bertha is one of only two boats out today. The rest of the Darien fleet languishes at the dock waiting for the summer shrimp season to open. For Boone, staying on the water means doing any and every thing to wring money from your boat. He has caught horseshoe crabs—prehistoric bulldozer-­‐like creatures—to sell for their blue blood which is used in the manufacture of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), a chemical used to test drugs and vaccines for unwanted bacteria. He’s caught Atlantic Sturgeon and run an Internet caviar business. He’s caught whelks, a conch-­‐like mollusk whose meat, after being tenderized, “is a lot like a pork chop” and is popular in the Northeast. But jellyfish have been a mainstay—a reliable source of revenue between Fall Shrimp and Roe Shrimp seasons whose opening and closing dates fluctuate depending on calculations made by Georgia Department of Natural Resource scientists. The crew on board the Miss Bertha today include Howell’s younger brother Milledge, a bear of a man in both his shape and propensity to scratch his back on the doorway, and his nephew Michael, who tells me that, at the age of 22, he is the youngest licensed shrimp boat captain on the East Coast. Michael agrees with his uncle. “We’re seeing a lot more of them this year,” he says while we talk in the pilothouse of the Miss Bertha. He steers with his foot while leaning back in the velour covered captain’s chair – a passenger seat from what looks like an ‘82 Chrysler Lebaron. In her transformation from shrimper to jellyballer, the Miss Bertha shows the signs of having been re-­‐outfitted for function first and form later. The welded car seats again point towards Boone’s ingenuity and why he has been able to stay afloat while so many of the other shrimpers were forced to quit long ago. The crew of the Miss Bertha are not the only ones seeing more jellyfish. All over the 27 Register world, there are reports of increased jellyfish activity. Over Memorial Day weekend in Florida this year, the New York Times reported 1,800 people stung and a few sent to the hospital as herds of beachgoers and a bloom of mauve stingers collided in the waves off of Cocoa Beach. Power stations in Israel and Scotland were closed temporarily due to large numbers of jellyfish clogging the intakes of their cooling systems. Some Mediterranean countries have resorted to deploying Australian-­‐style stinger nets—large playpen-­‐like structures girdled in fine mesh—along their coast. These cages were originally designed to protect Australian beach goers from potentially fatal sea-­‐wasp jellyfish that occur in northern Australian waters. Now they are used to protect bathers from the numerous non-­‐fatal but potentially tourist-­‐deterring jellyfish in the Mediterranean. In the Gulf of Mexico, waves of moon jellies have come, causing one researcher to remark that it is like there is a net of jellyfish that stretches from one side of the Gulf to the other. *** Prodded by media reports claiming “Jellyfish Invasion” and “Jellyfish Taking Over the World’s Oceans”, a National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Global Jellyfish Working Group—a group of international jellyfish researchers—has been formed and meets several times a year in California. The group is creating a database that incorporates datasets and research from all over the world in an effort to try and get some understanding of world jellyfish numbers. Though a large part of the biomass of the ocean, jellyfish have gotten short shrift in academic circles. For decades the governmental agencies that conduct surveys of marine life tossed jellyfish overboard without weighing or measuring them. “Jellyfish were considered a nuisance. No one cared about them,” said Fisheries Biologist, Ric Brodeur, a scientist who contributed his work to the NCEAS project and who is one 28 Register of the first to examine trends in jellyfish populations in the Bering Sea. A recent paper by jellyfish scientist Jennifer Purcell, also a contributor to the NCEAS jellyfish database, correlates changes to the oceans caused by man, specifically overfishing, nutrient runoff, increased coastal structure, the transportation of non-­‐indigenous species, aquaculture and climate change to increased jellyfish numbers. Because of this connection between jellyfish numbers and human changes to the oceans, changes in jellyfish populations have the potential to be a gauge of ocean health. There are numerous difficulties in trying to count jellyfish, however. Most come up as slime in nets, and they often congregate a few meters under the surface so satellites are ineffective at measuring them. Blooms visible from the air might be only a single individual or tens of meters of jellyfish thick. Many species are opportunistic, blooming when conditions are optimal, engaging in an orgy of eating and sex and quickly dying as their nearly microscopic asexual offspring affix themselves to some hidden place on the ocean floor and await the return of suitable conditions. Besides compiling datasets from scientists and governmental agencies, the NCEAS working group also accepts information from beachgoers, fishermen and divers that encounter jellies. People can list their jellyfish sightings at www.jellyfish.org a website created by the research arm of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Users can see a map of jellyfish sightings, download photos and get help identifying their jellies. This information contributes to the NCEAS database and helps the working group get a global understanding of jellyfish numbers and trends. *** After 45 minutes of navigating the maze of salt marsh, the river deposits the Miss Bertha into Doboy Sound. If I expected to see a huge dead area, I was mistaken. The Sound is teeming with life. As we enter, we are greeted by the jumping of a six-­‐foot Atlantic Sturgeon—an 29 Register ancient bone-­‐plated fish that can live up to 100 years. A loggerhead turtle peers at us before disappearing into the depths. On the horizon, a group of pelicans repeatedly spear the water. Our outriggers are suddenly festooned with black headed and laughing gulls. Navigating the Sound is difficult. We pass sand bars and islands that have built up around the skeletons of trees. These shift continually with storms and seasons and require that to a certain extent we feel our way out. From time to time Miss Bertha’s 8-­‐foot draft skips off the bottom and the wash comes up black with mud. Finally, at the south end of Sapelo Island we are in deeper water. In the shadow of its lighthouse, and with an audience of black-­‐headed gulls watching us from their colony on the shore, we lower the outriggers for our first drag. “Tidelines trap jellyballs,” Boone informs me gesturing at the line in the water that marks the front between the exiting muddy river on one side and emerald ocean on the other. As we put the nets out, a pod of porpoises appear. A mother and her calf rise and fall at the far end of the nets. She is teaching her calf that a shrimp boat means food—escaped fish too small to be caught in the mesh are funneled into a stream behind the nets. For the remainder of the afternoon, the pod follows us, staying just beyond the area Boone watches for the whitewash that indicates a net full of jellyfish is breaking the surface. *** Catching jellyfish is a lot like catching shrimp. The main difference is that the mesh of the nets used in jellyballin’ is larger than that used in shrimping. The boat drags three nets. The two main nets are about 100 feet long and trail from the outriggers. These taper from a wide mouth to a smaller mesh bag where the catch ends up. Pairs of wooden and steel doors, designed as hydrodynamic wings, spread in opposite directions as they are pulled forward through the water and hold the mouth of the net open. A much smaller net of the same design called a “try net” is pulled off of the middle of one of the outriggers as well. Though the wheelhouse of the Miss Bertha glows with GPS, sonar, computer maps, depth finders, and 30 Register radar, the soft bodies of the jellyfish can only be found by scouting the surface for them. The try net is used to sample and see if we are in the jellies. One key difference between shrimping and jellyballin’, however, is volume. A good day of shrimping is 400 pounds of shrimp. A good day of jellyballin’ is 100,000 pounds of jellyfish. Numerous times, the Miss Bertha has returned to the docks at Darien, with her name across the stern submerged and unreadable because the hold is full of jellyfish. Recently, the processor has instituted a quota system that establishes who he will buy from and how much. Today we hope to get 60,000 pounds. In 20 minutes, Boone gives the word and slows the boat. Michael and Milledge grab ropes connected to the bag end of the net and begin to haul. With the help of a huge diesel winch they call ‘the horse’ the bag is slowly pulled through the water. Soon the catch is suspended over the stern—a quivering, dripping, 10,000-­‐pound pink water balloon. Boone, dressed from head to toe in yellow raingear to avoid being dowsed in the ammoniac water the jellies have already begun discharging, trips the release at the bottom of the bag with a gaff. The jellyfish, pink and pert as blisters about to pop, come spilling out down the ramp through an iron grate and into the hold. These are not the gauzy, single layer of stinging cells that turn to goop when scooped up by a net. The cannonball jellyfish, as alluded to by its name, has a little more heft to it. Picture an opaque pink softball wearing a tiny soggy tutu. Cannonball jellyfish are round and firm and range from blue to yellow to pink with a brown band around the lip of their bell. They range from North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico and are often seen washed up on beaches after a storm. They sting but it is too weak to be felt by humans. They have a central round mouth on their underside and no tentacles. Instead, a stalk of fused oral arms captures their prey, microscopic zooplankton. They live from three to six months and though they can grow up to 10 inches in diameter, the ones we are seeing today are barely baseball sized. “That’s a good drag,” Boone says. It is the only time that day that I will see him satisfied 31 Register with what we bring up. We drag again in the Sound and then in the ditch—the area outside of the Sound where the river has carved a channel into the ocean floor—pulling up half and three quarter full nets. Still, if the first bag contained 10,000 pounds and we are shooting for 60,000, we should, even pulling up less than full bags, be able to meet quota in 10 or so drags and be home by dinner. Boone quickly corrects my math. “Those things start losing water as soon as we pull them out,” he tells me. Sure enough, when I look in the hold, what at first looked like a playground ball pen, is now rapidly filling with foamy water. The jellies, once spherical, are beginning to flatten. Boone explains that the wave action on the boat enhances the amount of water they lose. He is paid 6 to 8 cents a pound and wants his jellyfish to be as full of water as possible when he sells them. So it is a complex calculation that Boone must do to gauge between Miss Bertha’s fuel use, the jellies’ water loss and the prospects for additional good hauls. After having run the ditch a few times, Howell opts to head north along the shores of Sapelo Island up to Blackbeard, the next in the chain of coastal barrier islands that form the shoreline of this part of Georgia. Michael in the pilot’s house disagrees but defers to his uncle. “You should never leave ‘em to find ‘em,” he tells me. While I hear numerous stories of scenes of “jellies so thick you can walk on them,” those numbers never materialize. Instead we pull up the try net when we count bunches of twos and threes. On a drag just outside the mouth of the Sound, I am surprised when what appears to be a barnacle-­‐covered stump wearily waves a flipper from under a pile of jellies. Up until then, there had been little other than jellyfish in the nets we were pulling up. Howell and Michael each grab a flipper and pitch the loggerhead over the stern like a drunk out of a saloon. From my vantage point on the roof of the pilot’s house I see him float on the surface until I lose him in the glare. In total, I see three turtles come up – two juvenile loggerheads and the barnacle 32 Register covered one. On one of the juveniles, Michael attempts shrimper’s C.P.R., which consists of flipping him over, stepping on his chest a few times then wagging him around by his foot flippers. Whether or not due to, or despite this treatment, both of the two juveniles make it overboard on their own volition. Jellyballing is billed as a low bycatch fishery. Georgia DNR descriptions of the fishery describe its bycatch or the untargeted creatures that come up in addition to jellyfish as minimal. And until this, all that has come up besides jellies have been a few Spanish mackerel and a couple of sharks. I was surprised to see the turtles. “Did you see that old loggerhead?” Boone asks me when we meet in the galley. “He ‘s gonna' be fine.” But afterwards, I am requested to stay in the wheelhouse ostensibly to man the helm and make any course corrections but I think probably to keep me from seeing other turtles that might come up. Loggerheads are federally protected endangered species and harming them can result in stiff fines or jail. The day settles into a steady rhythm of dragging, pulling in the try net, and circling back over areas where we were successful. Our course being plotted on the computer map resembles the flight path of a bumblebee. None of the bags are as good as the first and the mood on board steadily plummets. A small blacktip shark comes up in one bag and Howell fillets it and fries it up for us to improve morale. Dinner is steak and pork chops from the freezer. Finally at 1:30 a.m. cognizant of fuel spent and the jellies shedding water weight, Boone decides to call it a day. We have still not made quota but it is late and he is going out again tomorrow. Michael takes over and pilots us home telling stories of his 2-­‐year-­‐old and describing his plans for roe shrimp season. *** 33 Register The next day, Jim Page, a wildlife biologist with Georgia Department of Natural Resources set me straight on the regulations. “There should be no fishing inside of three miles without TEDs (Turtle Excluder Devices),” he tells me. Outside of three miles, because of their unrecognized status by the federal government and because law specifies that it is shrimpers that must use the TEDs, jellyballers aren’t legally bound to use them. Much of the time, however, we were inside of three mile limit. When I ask Boone about it, he admits that he was not using TEDs but assures me that are in there now. I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on Boone. His father, Sinkey Boone, is credited with the creation of the “Georgia Jumper” a device he developed in the 1970’s to filter out the jellyfish that were clogging his and other shrimper’s nets. It also kept out horseshoe crabs, bigger fish and turtles. The “Georgia jumper” became the prototype for the Turtle Excluder Device (TED). That contentious grill-­‐like piece of metal that must be stitched into the net adjacent a hole that allows turtles and other animals bigger than 10 inches to exit. In April, Boone had gone to California to receive a reward posthumously given to his father for his role in turtle conservation. *** What prompts Boone to skirt the rules? The Darien fishermen that I talked with all say there is no change in shrimp numbers. Catching them has always been highly variable. Michael tells me about pulling up 500 pounds one day and less than 100 for the next two. They say that what is really hurting shrimping is not over fishing but the 1-­‐2 punch of cheap imports and rising fuel prices. The price per pound of shrimp has fallen from a peak of nearly $5 a pound in 2001 to just over $3 a pound in 2010. This drop in prices is attributed to an influx of cheap farmed 34 Register imports often raised in dubious circumstances. One reports states that worldwide, between 30% and 70% of the mangrove area has been removed to make way for shrimp farms. Rising fuel prices—$3.80 a gallon this year up from $2.90 this time last year and $2.50 two years ago—have also dealt the industry a blow. Efforts to brand Wild Georgia Shrimp as sustainable seafood in a similar way to Alaska salmon are inconclusive. When I went to knock on the Darien office door of the Georgia Shrimp Association, I could see through the dust covered glass that at least this branch was now being used to store hundreds of 5-­‐gallon buckets and fishing supplies. Meanwhile for a select few fishermen, jellyfish are bridging the gap. *** But who wants 120,000 pounds of jellyfish? Terry Chuang does. As a giant vacuum slurps the contents from the hold of the Blessed Assurance—the jellyballer who had the other 60,000-­‐pound quota the day we went out—
Chuang, owner of Golden Island International Inc. in Darien, shows me around his operation. Forklifts zip across the parking lot hauling dripping mesh bags of jellies that have finished going through the cleaning process—a series of large, hard plastic kiddie pools covered in netting on which loads of jellies are dumped and sprayed down by overhead sprinklers. After cleaning, the forklifts take the newly washed jellies to tables where workers, mostly Mexican, in hair nets, white butcher’s aprons and elbow length blue glove separate the bells from the trunks—the fused oral arms that descend down from the rounded bell. These will be sold separately and are less valued than the bells. Jellyfish are sold dehydrated and must be processed very soon after being caught. For every hundred pounds of jellies that he buys, Terry ends up with 12 pounds after they are 35 Register processed. Processing involves cleaning, separating and drying them with a mixture of salt and alum—a chemical used in water purification, leather tanning, baking powder and deodorant. The deodorant crystal found in many co-­‐ops is an alum crystal. “I will tell you the recipe,” Terry says. “It’s 12 parts salt to 3 parts alum. But you’ll never get it. I had to learn it myself and make all the mistakes.” And there are a lot of mistakes to be made. Terry sells almost all of his jellyfish to China where they have been eaten for more than a thousand years. Buyers gauge them by their color and texture. Too much water and they are soggy and turn yellow. Not enough, and the processor loses valuable weight. Though he is the only current processor, Terry Chuang is not the first person in America to see opportunity in jellyfish. Jellyballin’ has a rich history on Gulf Coast of Florida as well. According to Early Duggar, a fish processor turned restaurateur, the rise in interest in jellyfish coincides with the economic growth of the countries that are a market for them. When he was processing jellyfish in the 1980’s in the Gulf of Mexico in Panacea, Florida, they sent jellies to Taiwan and Korea. When Jack Rudloe, a specimen collector in Panacea won a grant in the 1990’s to learn about jellyfish processing in Malaysia, the market he was focused on was Japan. Today, Terry sells almost all of his jellyfish to China. As I am leaving the facility, Terry hands me two gallon sized plastic freezer bags—one full of bells the other, trunks. “I’ll send you a recipe,” he tells me and sends me on my way. Though I never did get that recipe and the jellyfish languished in the back of the refrigerator, its presence prompted me to contact Rita You, co-­‐owner of Lucky Strike, a Sichuan restaurant in Portland, Oregon, about trying jellyfish. Interestingly, for being the epitome of slime, jellyfish are valued for their crunch. One of the reasons that the cannonball is so sought after is because there is more “meat” to it. Rather than the gauzy moon jellies that come up in nets as crushed slime, cannonballs hold their shape. This is due to their high collagen content. There is also some belief that they have a medicinal value and can be used to treat the symptoms of arthritis. After being cleaned and dried, jellyfish have little taste on their own. Instead they are 36 Register valued for their texture. To prepare them for eating, jellyfish are reconstituted in fresh water and the salt is washed off. Then they are sliced like noodles, marinated and often eaten as a salad. In China, they are eaten at ceremonial gatherings like weddings and graduations and also with friends while drinking. You, a native of Sichuan Province, and her husband travel back every year to connect with family, recalibrate their taste buds, and learn new recipes. Jellyfish became popular in the land-­‐locked province because of their portability. Salted and dried, or reconstituted and sold in sealed packages, it was one of the few types of seafood that Sichuan people could get. Walking into Rita’s restaurant, I pass through a curtain made from toy red peppers giving apt warning about the spiciness of her food. Her jellyfish salad features the animal, reconstituted, and shredded in an oil and red pepper bath. Leaves of something she calls Chinese celery—a kind of intense celery with an extreme grassy taste—cut through the oil. Numerous people have told me that jellyfish taste like what you put on it and You had done a wonderful job of dressing it up. The shreds of jellyfish, opaque and glistening like beef fat, have a cartilaginous crunch that is not unappealing. After a couple of bites though, I have had enough. *** So are jellyfish being caught because they are all that is left in a denuded ocean? Georgia Department of Natural Resources landings data show a decline in pounds of shrimp caught since 2000 but also a substantial reduction in effort to catch them. Economic pressures have made shrimping too expensive for many shrimpers. In the 1960’s and 70’s, the Georgia shrimp fishery was largely unregulated and the fishery was in decline. To help stabilize it, a number of regulations were put in place. The current economic conditions—increased competition from cheap imports and high fuel costs— on top of these restrictions make life as a shrimper unprofitable. Right now jellyfish are filling 37 Register the void for a few but how long that can last and what impacts they are having are not known. *** So is Daniel Pauly right? Are we destined to dine on jellyfish? The prognosis isn’t good. The issues that contribute to increased jellyfish numbers are only becoming more pronounced. Nutrient runoff, mostly nitrogen from agricultural fertilizers, stimulates phytoplankton blooms on the coast. The tiny animals that feed on the phytoplankton—zooplankton—are the main food source of many types of nuisance jellies. When the phytoplankton blooms, often jellies aren’t far behind. Jellyfish also benefit from the low oxygen levels that occur when the uneaten phytoplankton die and bacteria begin to break it down. Jellyfish that hunt mostly by feel and need about 20% less oxygen than most fish, are at an advantage in these turbid oxygen poor “dead zones.” In 2009 there were 400 such zones, mostly at the mouths of rivers around the world. Each year there are more. Other problems include increased coastal structures, like oilrigs, docks, and aquaculture pens, where jellyfish polyps can congregate. These polyps—the asexual portion of the jellyfish lifecycle—and their larval and adult offspring often hitch a ride in transoceanic ships that use seawater for ballast. When the ballast water is discharged, so are the jellyfish. Sometimes they establish new populations. But another human action promoting jellyfish is the removal of its competitors and predators through overfishing. Once established, jellyfish can dominate an area by out-­‐competing juvenile fish for food and by eating larval fish and fish eggs. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization fisheries statistics show that in 2008, 85% of the fish stocks that they monitor worldwide were either fully or overexploited. While there is some data that suggest that US fisheries are stabilizing, 84 percent of the seafood Americans eat is imported. If there is a place that is being denuded it is not Darien even if some of the fishermen there are breaking the rules. The places that face the biggest threat from becoming jellyfish barrens are the unregulated regions that the cheap shrimp comes from. 38 Register Section 6 Market Analysis Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean is timely. Through overfishing, over fertilizing, altering coastal environments, transporting potentially invasive species and changing the climate, humans have made some parts of the ocean perfectly suited for jellyfish. And they seem to be taking full advantage of it. Blooms have increased in number in the Sea of Japan, The Mediterranean Sea, The Gulf of Mexico and many other places around the world. When they occur, blooms can displace fish, destroy aquaculture, scare off tourists and shut down power facilities. With coastal populations of both humans and jellyfish increasing, interactions like the one that recently occurred in Florida between beachgoers and a bloom of mauve stinger jellyfish that resulted in 1800 people stung and three sent to the hospital, will only become more common. Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean tells the story of these creatures, and of the human actions that promote them. A WorldCat* search for keyword “Jellyfish” returns 854 non-­‐fiction books in the English language. Of these, 218 are for a juvenile audience and 636 are for an adult audience. Of those aimed at an adult audience, as Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean would be, many are academic or governmental documents. A few are books that have a section or chapter on jellyfish. These include The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts, The Big Picture: Reflections on science, humanity and a quickly changing planet by David Suzuki and Oceana: Our endangered oceans and what we can do to save them by Ted Danson and Michael D'Orso. None are an entire book on the subject in the style that I am proposing—that is, a first person reportage of the effects of jellyfish blooms around the world. What I am proposing has been successfully done for other marine creatures, however. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky (Penguin Books, 1997) is ranked number one in the “Fish and Sharks” category on Amazon.com and number 4,988 on *
WorldCat is a database of more than 10,000 library catalogues from around the world (http://www.worldcat.org/). 39 Register the Amazon Best Sellers Rankings list. This book uses the fish to talk about fishing practices and was written at a time when the cod fishery off of Newfoundland had recently collapsed. Besides fisheries, the author uses the fish as a focal point from which to talk about religion, exploration, wars and food. In much the same way, Jellyfish tells the story of how the oceans have changed so rapidly and the effects these changes have to coastal communities. The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson (HarperCollins, 2004) is number seven in books about marine life in Amazon’s Books Ranking Lists. The tone of this book is closest to one I hope to emulate for Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean. Corson is funny and his material is the antics of bug-­‐like creatures scurrying in depths of the ocean. In making us laugh, Corson sneaks in a greater appreciation of lobsters, their natural environment and the fishing culture that depends on them. Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish by James Prosek (HarperCollins, 2010) takes the same global perspective that Jellyfish does. Number 38 in books about marine life in Amazon’s book rankings, Prosek’s blend of natural history and discussion of the animal’s cultural role as a food and religious symbol is very similar to the route Jellyfish would take as it explores the role of jellyfish not only in the ocean but in culture as well. That jellies thrive in regions of the ocean that people have altered and that they cause such a response in humans, means that, like Kurlansky’s codfish, Corson’s lobsters and Prosek’s eels, jellyfish have the potential to tell a larger story. 40 Register Section 7 Query Letter Rhett Register 417 SW 5th St. Corvallis, OR 97333 (541) 207-­‐7258 rhettregister@gmail.com August 27, 2011 Michelle Tessler Tessler Literary Agency 27 West 20th Street Suite 1003 New York, NY 10011 Dear Ms. Tessler: Over the 2011 Memorial Day weekend, thousands of Florida beachgoers found the ocean closed for business. Over three days, more than 1,800 people were stung and three sent to the hospital by a bloom of mauve stinger jellyfish, a type common in Europe but new to the east coast of Florida. The situation is part of a global trend. Worldwide, jellyfish are increasingly keeping beachgoers on shore, frustrating fishermen, killing aquacultured species and shutting down power plants. Human alteration of the oceans from fishing, fertilizing, altering the coastline, burning fossil fuels and transporting invasive species has created a marine environment that jellyfish thrive in, one that is similar to the oceans their ancestors dominated more than 500 million years ago. Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean is the story of the new, old ocean. An ocean made warmer and more acidic, one that has less oxygen and fewer species, in short, a more primitive ocean. It tells stories like that of coastal Namibia, an area that once had one of the most productive fisheries in the world. Now fishermen pull up more jelly than fish due to decades of overfishing by an international fleet of industrial fishing vessels. In recent years summer has meant jellyfish in Japan. Aerial photographs show coastlines smeared with the milky blooms of moon jellies. In deeper waters, giants lurk. Blooms of tens of millions of the Giant Nomura’s Jellyfish, the world’s largest, some weighing 450 pounds, fill Japanese coastal waters. By speaking with fishermen and scientists, tourists and surfers, Jellyfish: Dispatches from a Gelatinous Ocean offers a firsthand account of this new ocean. I have Master’s of Science in marine resource management, a degree that provided me with a solid background in ocean sciences and the flexibility to take classes to help me learn to communicate them. I have published writing in newspapers, magazines and on the Internet. Enclosed are a brief synopsis and an SASE for your reply. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, Rhett Register 41 Register Section 8 Submission Timeline Friday, September 30, 2011 Week of October 3, 2011 Week of October 17, 2011 Monday, October 31, 2011 Week of November 7, 2011 Week of January 9, 2012 Edits offered by defense committee have been incorporated and proposal is finalized. Submit query to first agent. If no response from agent, submit follow-­‐up email asking that receipt be confirmed and if any additional information can be provided. If no response from agent, inform him/her that proposal will be submitted to another agent in one week’s time. Submit query to second agent. Follow steps above. Holiday Season Submit query to third agent. Follow steps above. Notes: If after submitting the proposal to the selected agents, I have had no response, begin querying magazines for summer pieces about jellyfish. Magazines like Outside or Mother Jones may be interested in an article of this type for the summer. Submit with the idea that many books often begin as magazine articles and that many book chapters or variations of them have been published previously in magazines. Publication would add credential to the author and the topic. 42 Register Section 9 Lessons Learned Before attempting this project, I had not done extensive reporting in the field or research on this scale. What I realize, after writing this proposal, is the magnitude of a book project of this type. To do it correctly will be a full time job especially during the reporting and initial framing of the chapters. I still feel, however, that there is a place for a book about jellyfish and that it could be an interesting and marketable way of showing how humans are changing the ocean. I am committed to refining and presenting this proposal in the hopes of getting the opportunity to write that book. The process of creating this proposal has introduced me to a number of new skills that are required to write a book of this type. My skills as a researcher, writer and editor have all been improved by this experience. I also learned a number of aspects of my own writing style had I had not previously known. While researching the book, I learned research techniques that have been applicable to other projects that I have worked on. Using the “WorldCat” international library catalogue to get a general understanding of what is available and who is writing on the subject before delving into specific research papers has been a productive way to begin other research projects that I have done since writing this proposal. The writing and editing process of creating this proposal has been extremely useful for me as a writer. The comments made by my committee forced me to be more clear. Reading and then rereading Writing for Story (1986) and The Elements of Style (1979) have made writing more of an orderly process for me. Some tangible lessons that I have learned about my writing style as a result of writing this proposal: •
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I have found that it takes time, sometimes hours of writing before things start to “flow” and I feel that I am making headway. It is best if I work on one thing (at most two) a day. I found during the writing of this, that subdividing it into day-­‐length sections was the best way to make progress. I found that alternating writing on the computer with printing what I have written and editing it with a red pen forms a good rhythm and helps me stay productive longer. I also found that breaks at the top of the hour for five or ten minutes helped me work for longer periods of time. 43 Register Some tangible lessons that I have learned about my use of language as a result of writing this proposal: •
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I tend to use a lot of clichés. I learned that I like the room a project like this affords and I am interested in continuing it. Finally, it was both the rigor and flexibility of the MRM program that allowed me to do a project of this type. Its backbone of core classes on ocean science introduced me to new ways of thinking about the ocean. The flexible nature of class selection around those core classes allowed me to take classes in the journalism department at both Oregon State University and University of Oregon. 44 Register References Barnett, T.P. et al. Penetration of human-­‐induced warming into the world’s oceans. Science 309, 284 (2005). Corson, T. The secret life of lobsters: how fishermen and scientists are unraveling the mysteries of our favorite crustacean. (Perennial: 2005). Diaz, R.J. & Rosenberg, R. Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. science 321, 926 (2008). Doney, S.C., Fabry, V.J., Feely, R.A. & Kleypas, J.A. Ocean acidification: the other CO2 problem. Marine Science 1, (2009). Duarte, C.M., Agustí, S. & Regaudie-­‐de-­‐Gioux, A. The Role of Marine Biota in the Functioning of the Biosphere. (Fundación BBVA: 2011). Fabry, V.J., Seibel, B.A., Feely, R.A. & Orr, J.C. Impacts of ocean acidification on marine fauna and ecosystem processes. ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 65, 414 (2008). Franklin, J. Writing for story: Craft secrets of dramatic nonfiction by a two-­‐time Pulitzer Prize winner. (Atheneum: 1986). Graham, W.M. & Bayha, K.M. Biological invasions by marine jellyfish. Biological Invasions 239–255 (2007). Gregoire, C., Kulongoski, T., & Schwarzenegger, A. West Coast Governors’ Agreement on Ocean Health (2009). Guinotte, J.M. & Fabry, V.J. Ocean acidification and its potential effects on marine ecosystems. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1134, 320–342 (2008). Kurlansky, M. Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world. (Penguin Group USA: 1998). Lynam, C.P. et al. Jellyfish overtake fish in a heavily fished ecosystem. Current Biology 16, 492 (2006). Lyon, E. Nonfiction book proposals anybody can write: how to get a contract and advance before writing your book. (Perigee: 2002). Orr, J.C. et al. Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-­‐first century and its impact on calcifying organisms. (2005). Pew Oceans Commission. America’s living oceans: charting a course for sea change. A report to nation, Pew Oceans Commission, Arlington, VA, 144 (2003). 45 Register Pinsky, M.L., Jensen, O.P., Ricard, D. & Palumbi, S.R. Unexpected patterns of fisheries collapse in the world’s oceans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 8317 (2011). Prosek, J. Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Mysterious Fish. (Harper: 2010). Purcell, J.E. Climate effects on formation of jellyfish and ctenophore blooms: a review. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK 85, 461–476 (2005). Purcell, J.E., Uye, S. & Lo, W.T. Anthropogenic causes of jellyfish blooms and their direct consequences for humans: a review. Marine Ecology Progress Series 350, 153–174 (2007). Richardson, A.J., Bakun, A., Hays, G.C. & Gibbons, M.J. The jellyfish joyride: causes, consequences and management responses to a more gelatinous future. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24, 312–322 (2009). Steel, B.S. et al. Public ocean literacy in the United States. Ocean & coastal management 48, 97–114 (2005). Strunk Jr, W. & White, E.B. The elements of style. New York. 6, (1979). Sumaila, U.R. & Skogen, M.D. Namibia’s fisheries: ecological, economic and social aspects. (Eburon Publishers, Delft: 2004). US Commission on Ocean Policy. An ocean blueprint for the 21st century: final report (Vol. 7). Report of the US Commission on Ocean Policy Governor’s Draft, Washington, DC, 446 (2004). Weigold, M.F. Communicating science. Science Communication 23, 164 (2001). Worm, B. et al. Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. science 314, 787 (2006). 46 Register