Those Who Stay in the Bosphorus

 What is global warming? Is nature an ancient friend that never changes and will never end, as we often think, or does nature in the sense we know have an end? More importantly, do we have a chance to change the future of our planet?

The jellyfish find habitats everywhere from the sea surface to the deepest of the oceans; the bigger ones are called “Sea jellyfish” and the smaller ones are called “Sea Liver”. Jellyfish have been fighting for their survival in the nature for 650 million years. It is obvious that jellyfish are successful in this struggle, although many species got extinct over time. The jellyfish feed on the polyps and plankton, which live on the hard surfaces of the seabed,fish larvae and litter; it causes the number of fish to decrease.

Increasing sea water temperature, garbage, nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen causes an increase in the number of plankton in sea water. Biological invasion, that is, the absence of natural enemies in the new region where the jellyfish moved from one region to another with the ballast waters of the ships, causes the jellyfish to become very dominant and cause great damage to the ecosystem.

Emphasizing that warming accelerates the spread of invasive species, scientists state that invasive species have already replaced ecologically important local species, especially in our Mediterranean and South Aegean coasts. It is known that when the ecosystem deterioration is combined with overfishing, the space emptied from fish is filled by opportunistic jellyfish species and restoring the balance again is quite difficult.

The reason for the extraordinary jellyfish increase around the World and Istanbul Bosphorus, which has been observed for the last 10 years, consists of global climate change, temperature increase in sea water, excessive and illegal fishing and excessive pollution.