"Europe's costal resorts battle a Jellyfish invasion"

By John Lichfield and Elizabeth Nash / from The Independent (UK)

From Cannes to the Costa del Sol, holidaymakers are under attack. As millions of toxic jellyfish lay siege to the beaches of the Mediterranean, coastal communities are battling to turn the tide.

Jean-Marie Giorgis, assistant mayor of Cannes, has a view of the Gulf of Fré jus that foreign billionaires would die, or even pay taxes, for. From his office, he can see red rocks, blue sea, green islands, dart-like yachts and glittering cruise ships. Just below his window are the warm stones of a small fishing village that has exploded into one of the world's most elegant coastal resorts.

As he answers a telephone call from an official somewhere out in the bay, Giorgis is not interested in any of these things. Not today. "Are there any jellyfish out there?" he asks. "No sign of them? Thank heaven for that."

Giorgis is in charge of Cannes' most treasured assets: its beaches and its waterfront. For the time being, that makes him the town's "Monsieur Méduse" or "Mr Jellyfish".

Like dozens of other resorts along the north Mediterranean coast, Cannes is under siege from a monstrous-looking primeval creature from the depths. For reasons still little understood, this summer the coast is facing a plague of an especially poisonous and painful species of stinging jellyfish, the " mauve stinger", or Pelagia noctiluca. Luminous at night, it is armed with a ferocious sting that can swiftly paralyse humans.

Follow the coast further west from Cannes and the mauve stinger invasion is in full spate, threatening Spanish holiday beaches from the Costa del Sol to the Costa Brava. The Spanish environment ministry has adopted new measures to combat the annual onslaught, which has been worsening steadily for two decades...

Sixty million jellyfish swept up on Spanish beaches in 2006, and more than 70,000 holidaymakers were treated for painfully swollen limbs and allergic reactions – 300 in one day in Benalmadena, near Malaga. The year before, four glaucous tons of stranded jellyfish were carted from the luxury coastal resort of Marbella. The environment ministry has mobilised hundreds of volunteers, skippers of pleasure craft, divers and fishermen the length of the southern coastline in an early warning system to alert for poisonous swarms before they approach the beach.

Joachim Such, manager of the Nautical Club of Altea, near Benidorm, is among those who have signed up. "They've asked me to recruit experienced people who go to sea regularly throughout the summer. When they spot a bank of jellyfish, there's a freephone number to call and a special procedure to report sightings," Such says. Once forewarned, local authorities onshore are then meant to prepare for the imminent invasion by mobilising Red Cross medical attendants, alerting bathers or closing off the beach entirely.

In the regions of greatest risk, including the coast off Malaga, the ministry has leased boats to scoop up the glutinous creatures before currents and winds sweep them ashore. Nets have been used to trap swarms spotted at sea, although that measure was found to be counterproductive: the jellyfish would just release their tentacles, which floated inshore semi-decomposed but with their stings still intact.

One of the films in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May was an Israeli movie called Les Méduses ("Jellyfish"). Local people wondered whether it was a joke against them, a spoof remake of Spielberg's Jaws. The film actually used the jellyfish – beautiful, near-invisible but toxic – as a metaphor for the hidden complexities of the human soul.

Jellyfish may have points of comparison, but they are nowhere near as nasty as sharks. Nevertheless, their stings can be very painful: "like touching a hot stove", according to one victim. Jellyfish stings can lead to unpleasant rashes or respiratory problems among the elderly or physically infirm. They are almost never fatal. All the same, many visitors to the Côte d'Azur are wondering whether it is – in the words of the Jaws poster – "safe to go back into the water".

...Two weeks ago, one fairly early assault engulfed beaches at Xabia, north of Benidorm. Seventy bathers were stung before the beach was closed; usually the jellyfish don't come to Xabia till August. And last week 19 beaches in Catalonia, including five off Barcelona, flew the yellow flag indicating danger from jellyfish.

...This week, Cannes took the lead in anti-jellyfish defence on the Mediterranean coast. A sophisticated diamond-shaped floating boom, attached to a fine, 2m-deep net, was deployed around three of the public beaches on the 10-mile waterfront.

...Spanish authorities have also enlisted help from the jellyfish's main predator since ancient times, the leatherback turtle (Caretta caretta). Spaniards call it the tortuga boba – stupid turtle – because of its clumsiness in catching fish, a deficiency the creature overcomes by preying on jellyfish instead. But the leatherback's beach-side habitat, where it lays its eggs, has been ravaged by tourism, and the animal is under the looming threat of extinction.

Authorities have planted some 800 turtle eggs along the coast, in the hope that they will hatch and eat the translucent invaders before they harm holidaymakers. Some 60 live turtles have also been released around the Cabo de Gata in Almeria. But the operation is only a panacea, acknowledges the local marine biologist, Juan Jesus Martin. "The protection and recuperation of the species is needed to restore the balance of the ecosystem," he says.

But why have the jellyfish suddenly become so abundant in the Mediterranean?

There are more than 10,000 species of jellyfish. They are not, to be a ccurate, fish at all, but a kind of giant plankton, which cannot swim but float on currents and the tide. Curiously, the same orifice in the jellyfish acts as both mouth and anus, which makes them – apart from their lack of backbone - a useful source of insulting political analogies.

Some scientists and ecological campaigners explain the new prevalence by pointing to a rise in average sea temperature, linked to the warming of the planet. Lack of rain has meant a shortage of cold fresh water entering the sea from rivers, with the end result of a warmer, saltier sea that puts off larger creatures but is well-suited to jellyfish. Human sewage, together with fertilisers from intensive farming along the Mediterranean coast, produces a rich soup of nitrogen and phosphates that jellyfish also like.

Others blame the fact that natural jellyfish predators – such as the bluefin tuna and the turtle – have been driven almost to extinction, a consequence of overfishing and pollution. Still others think that the jellyfish explosion might be connected to the overfishing of other species, such as the anchovy and the sardine, which used to compete for the minute creatures and plankton on which jellyfish voraciously feed.

There also seems to be a connection with a change in the wind and the pattern of the Mediterranean currents, which may themselves be linked to global warming. Jellyfish live deep in the sea during the day but rise to the surface at night to feed. For all their undulating mobility, jellyfish have little control over where they travel, and are mostly swept along by currents and prevailing winds that propel the creatures landwards.

It all signals a deep malaise in the Mediterranean. "Every jellyfish that comes ashore brings us the message that the sea is sick," says Josep Maria Gigli, scientific coordinator of the Spanish environment ministry's Medusa Plan.

Apart from the mauve stinger, various other species also thrive in the Mediterranean. One regular visitor is Cortylorhiza tuberculata, known as " fried egg", which luxuriates in the warm, salty lagoons near the fashionable Murcian resort of La Manga, lagoons rich in nutrients from the fertilisers drained from the region's intensive plastic-greenhouse agriculture. The fried egg's sting is mild, but its sheer numbers transform the water into a milky gloop. Rhizostoma pulpo, or octopus jellyfish, named for its eight long tentacles, is also on the increase.

The deadly Portuguese Man o' War (Physalia physalis) is increasingly being swept towards Europe's Atlantic coasts, in "blooms" resembling a sinister sea of plastic bags. But so far, currents have yet to drag this majestic but deadly creature through the Gibraltar Strait into the Mediterranean....

The French-Canadian biologist Daniel Pauly paints an apocalyptic vision of oceans taken over by jellyfish: "We are moving from a marine ecosystem dominated by big fish to a soup of small organisms. If we carry on like this the only things in the sea will be jellyfish and plankton soup."

A return to primeval slime? "A lot of pressures are pushing in that direction," says Dr Santilo. "The mechanisms are there to make that happen. Ecosystems are flexible up to a point, but no one knows when elasticity breaks into a different sort of ecosystem and you get an irreversible shift. This plague of jellyfish is a like hazard warning light. It's a wake-up call."

Ecologists do not criticise the Spanish government's effort to protect holidaymakers from unwelcome tentacular visitors. But they say it is not enough. "It's like using a fly swat to combat malaria," says Ricardo Aguilar, a spokesman for the international environmental organisation Oceana. "The sickness remains."

...Their numbers were worryingly large last year. There was something close to a panic when the bays and coves were suddenly filled with near-invisible stinging creatures the size of soup plates. This summer, they have been elusive, teeming along some parts of the French Mediterranean coast, absent in others...

Some of the stinging jellyfish to avoid include:

* Lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata). Grows to 50cm but can reach 2m in diameter. Large, reddish brown, umbrella-shaped bell with a mass of long, thin, hair-like tentacles, in addition to four short, thick-frilled and folded arms.

* Mauve stinger (Pelagia noctiluca). Can reach up to 10cm in diameter and has a deep bell with pink or mauve warts. Has 16 marginal lobes, eight marginal, hair-like tentacles and four longer, frilled arms with tiny pink spots.

* Compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella). Can grow up to 30cm in diameter. Usually has a pale umbrella-shaped bell with brownish, V-shaped markings. It has 32 marginal lobes and 24 long, thin tentacles. Four long, thick-frilled arms hang from the underside's centre.

* Moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita). This transparent jellyfish with an umbrella-shaped bell edged with short, hair-like tentacles can grow up to 40cm. Its sting is mild and the most distinguishing feature is its four purple rings in the centre of its bell – its reproductive organs.

* Blue jellyfish (Cyanea lamarckii). Similar in shape to C. capillata but is smaller with a blue bell through which radial lines can be seen. It has a mild sting.

* By-the-wind-sailor (Velella velella). Not a true jellyfish but a floating colony of individual creatures known as a hydranth. Can grow up to 10cm long and is blue-purple. Can occur in vast swarms.

*Portuguese Man-of-War (Physalia physalis). Again, not a true jellyfish but a floating colony of microscopic hydrozoans. Its distinguishing feature is the oval-shaped, transparent float complete with crest, below which hang many "fishing polyps" that can be tens of metres long. The powerful stings are extremely dangerous. They are fortunately rare in British waters, but not unheard of.