A vast flotilla of small, virtually undetectable jellyfish have stung hundreds of people on Spanish beaches this week — a swimmer’s nightmare that biologists say will become increasingly common because of climate change and overfishing.
The blobs attacked three areas near the eastern city of Elche along a famed stretch of white sand beaches known as the Costa Blanca. On Tuesday alone, 380 people were stung, compared with the usual four or five swimmers a day, said Juan Carlos Castellanos of the Elche city tourism department.
The was no sign of the jellyfish on Wednesday, but since Sunday at least 700 people have been stung.
“In the five or six years I have been in this job, I have never seen anything like this,” Castellanos said.
The beaches were never closed, but officials put up warning signs and stationed lookout boats offshore.
The tourism official blamed strong currents for sweeping the jellyfish onto the beaches and then calm seas for letting them hang around for three days. Particularly warm waters — which jellyfish like — also helped boost their numbers during Spain’s key summer tourism season.
One problem was these jellyfish were small, almost transparent and thinly spread out over 5km of coastline.
“The swimmers could probably not even see them,” Castellanos added.
Far to the north, a much more menacing species looms — the Portuguese Man-of-War, a floating, violet-colored sack with meters-long tentacles. They have stung more than 300 people over the past three weeks in Atlantic waters off Spain’s northern coasts of Cantabria and the Basque region, officials said.
Spanish marine biologists say, in general, they are seeing fewer jellyfish this summer than in other years. In the Catalonia region and the Balearic islands officials said this summer has been relatively quiet on the jellyfish front.
However, scientists also say Spanish beachgoers are going to have to get used to higher concentrations of jellyfish.
Normally, jellyfish are kept from getting close to the shore by a natural barrier of less-salty water formed with runoff from summer rains.
But with rain more scant because of global warming, this protective cushion is weaker, said Jose Maria Gili, a jellyfish specialist at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona.
Another problem is overfishing, which depletes stocks of tuna, swordfish and other species that are natural predators of jellyfish.
Fewer fish means fewer competitors for tiny plankton that jellyfish feed on, allowing the latter to flourish, Gili says.
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
‘INCREDIBLY TROUBLESOME’: Hours after a judge questioned the legality of invoking a wartime power to deport immigrants, the president denied signing the proclamation The US on Friday said it was terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, giving them weeks to leave the country. US President Donald Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations. The order affects about 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came to the US under a scheme launched in October 2022 by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, and expanded in January the following year. They would lose their legal protection 30 days after the US Department of Homeland Security’s order is published in the Federal
RSS