Swarms of venomous jellyfish move towards British waters
The lethal mauve stingers - are tiny but can cover hundreds of thousands of square miles in one "bloom". They are normally found in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. But billions of them are swarming far more frequently into waters in the north east Atlantic as sea temperatures are rising and currents are changing, scientists told the newspaper the Telegraph.
These venomous creatures can devastate fish farms and in one recent incident 100,000 salmon were killed.Mauve stingers "bloom" when they move into waters where there is plentiful food, and the north east Atlantic has bountiful supplies of plankton and young fish.
Experts researching plankton discovered the movement towards British waters, according to a study published in the journal Biology Letters, led by Dr Priscilla Licando at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, and Dr Richard Kirby, a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth.
Dr Kirby said: "By studying plankton samples we have shown that the warm-water jellyfish called Pelagia noctiluca appears to be the main species present in our samples when large blooms of jellyfish occur in the north east Atlantic. "We believe that an increase in sea temperature is likely to influence jellyfish abundance by affecting their reproduction.”
