Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of American Institute of Biological Sciences for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in BioScience 62 (2012): 160-169, doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.2.9.
Description:
During the past several decades, high numbers of gelatinous Zooplankton species have been reported in many estuarine and coastal ecosystems. Coupled with media-driven public perception, a paradigm has evolved in which the global ocean ecosystems are thought to he heading toward being dominated by “nuisance” jellyfish. We question this current paradigm by presenting a broad overview of gelatinous Zooplankton in a historical context to develop the hypothesis that population changes reflect the human-mediated alteration of global ocean ecosystems. To this end, we synthesize information related to the evolutionary context of contemporary gelatinous Zooplankton blooms, the human frame of reference for changes in gelatinous Zooplankton populations, and whether sufficient data are available to have established the paradigm. We conclude that the current paradigm in which it is believed that there has been a global increase in gelatinous Zooplankton is unsubstantiated, and we develop a strategy for addressing the critical questions about long-term, human-related changes in the sea as they relate to gelatinous Zooplankton blooms.
Description:
Funding for NCEAS and the JWG comes from National
Science Foundation Grant no. DEB-94-21535, from the University
of California at Santa Barbara, and from the State of
California. MND was supported in part by National Science
Foundation Grant no. DEB-07-17071.
Keywords:
Bloom
;
Media
;
Jellyfish
;
Salp
;
Global synthesis
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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