Many Nomura's jellyfish grow to be as large as a sumo wrestler. At that size, it only takes about 5 to 10 of them to destroy a commercial fishing net.
Chinese fishermen venturing out to sea in the wake of devastating Typhoon Morakot say they encountered an unprecedented number of giant jellyfish off the coast of Zhejiang province.
“There must be thousands of them, like huge mushrooms sprouting on the surface of the water. The biggest was about 7 feet in diameter,” fisherman Lin Jinfu told the Xinhua news agency.
Last month, Japanese marine researchers said they were also alarmed by unusually large numbers of the Nomura’s jellyfish swimming from off the Chinese coast toward Japan’s coastal waters.
Theories for why the population of the invertebrates has spiked this year range from agricultural runoff in East China to overfishing, which reduced the populations of the young jellyfish’s natural predators.
Photo: Sankei