10:52. The symp has just started with some 150 persons aboard. Short talk by the organization and then an opening, superb talk by Larry Madin who framed the issue with a panoramic view spanning the blooms, the deep ocean, the new methodologies, the challenges and, of course, the beauty of these animals.
Rob COndon spoke about the JEDI group and their endeavor. Summary: jellies increase in some places but not in others. The global mean is no increase, yet they claim that many more data are need, in particular long time series. This poses a funding challenge.
Catherine Hollyhead followed Rob’s lead and tried to evaluate global jelly biomass. Interestingly, she speask of the lowest abundance in the Indian Ocean, where we observed maximum biomasses during the MALASPINA 2010 global expedition. She does a fantastic overview by ocean, region, latitude, etc,… Differences among hemispheres may be due to differences in data coverage. Some messages for the future trends, with possibility of increase in thaliaceans, on northward expansion of warm-water taxa, etc,..
Kylie Pitt focused on ana analysis of the published evidence for a rise in jellyfish, also stemming from the JEDI effort. Their point is that a paradigm of jellyfish increase has evolved in the absence of rigorous evidence, by a thread of papers that cite other papers that cite other papers supossedly demonstrating a rise in jellyfishes. She advices on using the proper citations to backuo our claims of increases in jellyfish. Otherwise scientists will not be trusted.
Macarena Marambio, from Spain. She works in the fantastic research team led by Veronica Fuentes and Josep Maria Gli, in the ICM Barcelona. She spoke about the MEDUSA project funded by the Generalidad of Catalonia and on how to use public information to gather evidence on jellyfish trends. They have developed an app (MEDJELLY 2.0) to help people identify, report and treat injuries due to jellyfishes, to decide wether to go to the beach or not, and to enter data in their database. They have distributed papers and posters and public info, with a great and demonstrable impact. They are developing a very useful tool to bring the jellyfish issue to the general public, and their ideas will surely be incorporated in other regions of the world. Questions: how many people validate the data gathered, in particular species identification? Answer: there are two persons checking incoming data. They will have a very busy summer. Question: a problem with many studies is the absence of cero data. Answer: the rescue services report first thing in the morning, and if there are no jellies, they report a 0, so the issue is addressed. Vary interesting.
Antonio Canepa, also from Varonica Fuente’s group, talked about observations of jellyfishes stranded in the catalan coast. He builds regression models to investigate the conditions leading to these beaching events and to forecast them. Very nice talk on how to use public information to feed regression models and forecast future beacj¡hing events
Maria Loureiro tries to address the economic costs of jellyfish blooms in the Barcelona Area. How much would you pay for not having jellyfish in your beach? How much are you willing to travel to find a suitable beach? This is the type of questions allowing to estimate the economic cost of jellyfishes. They also explore tradeoffs between several potential apects like jellyfishes, water quality, services and facilities, etc,,,.