Xiang Yang stood up, flexed his wrist, and then said, "Since we have encountered it, should we try to catch it?"
"Spending effort to gain publicity?" Wu Shiwen asked.
"Who said it's a waste of effort to gain publicity? Don't you know that jellyfish stings are edible? And they're quite expensive." Xiang Yang said with a smile.
"What? Jellyfish can be eaten?" Wu Shiwen said with wide eyes.
"Of course, ordinary jellyfish cannot be eaten, but stinging jellyfish can be eaten," Xiang Yang replied.
Wu Shiwen got a positive answer from Xiang Yang and immediately became excited. There were so many stinging jellyfish in this sea area. If they were really edible and expensive, they would definitely make a fortune.
Of course, jellyfish are not so easy to catch.
In the ocean, sea snakes have always been the king of poison that makes people shudder.
However, the fact is that the venom of most sea snakes is actually not as strong as that of jellyfish.
The box jellyfish, in particular, is known as the most poisonous creature in nature.
In the ocean, the most terrifying creature is not the great white shark, nor the invincible killer whale, but the jellyfish.
When a large group of jellyfish marches through an area of the ocean, almost every creature except turtles has to give way.
Xiang Yang walked to the side of the ship and looked down into the ocean.
Although these jellyfish are transparent in color, they are still easy to find if you are determined to look for them. They move forward in the ocean by spraying water. When Xiang Yang stood on the deck and looked down, it was as if he saw crystal flowers, as beautiful as ice crystals.
"It's no wonder that these creatures appeared on this planet hundreds of millions of years ago. They can even reproduce in Antarctica." Chen Qingsheng remembered that Xiang Yang once said that jellyfish appeared hundreds of millions of years ago and their racial history is even longer than that of dinosaurs, so he exclaimed in amazement.
Xiang Yang looked at Chen Qingsheng and said with a smile: "That's nothing. The survival ability of jellyfish is much stronger than you think. They can not only appear in Antarctica, but also in trenches thousands of meters deep, and even in fresh waters."
Xiang Yang is very familiar with jellyfish. He knows how terrible they are and is even more aware of the disaster that large gatherings of jellyfish will bring to the sea.
Jellyfish are beautiful, and aquariums in many places keep various kinds of jellyfish for people to admire.
But when jellyfish in the ocean reproduce like crazy, they are no longer gentle. They are the culprit of marine ecological disasters and a global problem.
For humans, the rampant infestation of jellyfish is also a huge disaster.
For example, last June, a large number of jellyfish suddenly appeared in the sea near the Tonneau nuclear power plant in Scotland. Those jellyfish blocked the seawater filtration pool, and the liquid could not enter the refrigeration system, so the two nuclear reactors had to be shut down urgently.
After local fishermen dispatched three trawlers to salvage the jellyfish for two days, the crisis was over.
Last July, a beach in the United States was covered with white, translucent jellyfish overnight.
Soon after, similar situations occurred in Dongyi, Israel and other countries. Large numbers of fish eggs were swallowed by jellyfish, and the ecological environment of many oceans suffered irreversible damage.
The outbreak of jellyfish is definitely an ecological disaster and a global problem.
Jellyfish are very ancient creatures. It is said that in the Cambrian period 550 million years ago, jellyfish were the overlords of the ocean.
However, later dinosaurs became the overlords of the ocean, and later sharks and whales became the overlords of the ocean.
In fact, with the destruction of the marine ecological environment, since 2000, jellyfish outbreaks, which used to occur only once every 40 years, have begun to occur every year around the world.
The situation has worsened especially since June last year.
According to a research team from the National Science Foundation, there are at least fourteen ocean areas in the world where jellyfish outbreaks frequently occur, including the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the coast of Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico, etc.
Whenever there is a jellyfish outbreak in a certain sea area, the sea and the beach are full of jellyfish, posing a great threat to the safety of local fisheries, tourism, coastal power plants and nuclear power plants.
Our neighboring country Dongyi is an island country that relies on the sea for its livelihood. Ever since a few fishermen discovered in 2002 that what they caught were jellyfish instead of fish, tens of billions of jellyfish have been active in the Japanese waters every year over the next twenty years.
In the Black Sea, whenever there is a jellyfish outbreak, there may be more than a thousand fist-sized jellyfish per cubic meter of sea water, causing economic losses of up to hundreds of millions of dollars to the local tourism and fisheries industries.
In addition, nearly 200 million sea bathing enthusiasts and fishermen around the world are deeply troubled by jellyfish. In Florida alone, more than 200,000 people are stung by jellyfish every year.
Even our coastal waters are severely affected by jellyfish disasters.
In July 2009, a jellyfish disaster occurred at a power plant in Qingdao.
At that time, due to the influx of a large number of jellyfish into the water intake of the seawater pump room, the workers continued to clean it around the clock. In the end, a total of ten tons of jellyfish were cleared out in three days.
That jellyfish invasion caused a significant impact on electricity consumption for nearby residents and industries.
In addition, jellyfish have been lurking in the deep sea for billions of years, and have multiplied in large numbers in recent decades, invading the coastal waters of various countries. They are simply impossible to eliminate completely, so foodies around the world who are not afraid of death have begun to cook jellyfish like Shennong tasting hundreds of herbs.
After countless chefs and foodies tried their best, the method of cooking jellyfish was finally figured out.
Of course, humans have done much more than this to eliminate jellyfish.
Take our country for example.
In order to find the real cause of jellyfish outbreaks and ways to control them, my country's 973 project "Jellyfish Project" was officially launched at the end of 2010.
Led by the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a total of 40 scientists from six units across the country and thousands of staff members formed a very large research team to start research on the project.
Sun Song, chief scientist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "We use jellyfish as a carrier to study the changes in the entire coastal ecosystem of China and how it will change in the future. This is our real purpose."
There are more than 1,400 species of jellyfish in the world, and nearly 300 of them are known large species. Which jellyfish affect the ecological security of my country's coastal waters? This is the first question that needs to be clarified in the research project.
However, it is not easy to track and observe jellyfish in the wild.
Take the instruments on Gao Chuang’s processing mothership as an example.
The detection instrument on Gao Chuang's ship is the most advanced commercial detector in the world today. It can detect schools of fish in the three thousand meter deep sea, but it is helpless against underwater jellyfish and cannot even detect jellyfish ten meters underwater.
This is because 95% of the jellyfish's body is seawater, and it is translucent, making it difficult to see and detect using either sonar or optics.