Giant Jellyfish Invasion Fills Japanese Waters, Fishing Nets - Reuters

[hatrack]

TOKYO, Jan 19 (Reuters) - A slimy jellyfish weighing as much as a sumo wrestler has Japan's fishing industry in the grip of its poisonous tentacles. Vast numbers of Echizen kurage, or Nomura's jellyfish, have appeared around Japan's coast since July, clogging and ripping fishing nets and forcing fishermen to spend hours hacking them apart before bringing home their reduced catches.

Representatives of fishing communities around the country gathered in Tokyo on Thursday, hoping to thrash out solutions to a pest that has spread from the Japan Sea to the Pacific coast. "It's a terrible problem. They're like aliens," Noriyuki Kani of the fisheries federation in Toyama, northwest of Tokyo, told Reuters ahead of the conference.

There are no official figures on the size of the problem, but Kani says the financial losses are obvious. "If your nets are full of jellyfish, of course there is no space for fish," he said. Cutting up and disposing of the giants can turn a three-hour fishing trip into a 10-hour marathon, while valuable fish are poisoned or crushed under the weight of the unwanted catch. And what a catch. One Echizen kurage can be up to 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kg (440 lb).

EDIT

South Korean fishermen have been suffering similar woes but China, where giant jellyfish are a delicacy often served dried and dressed with sesame oil, does not seem to have registered the outbreak as a major problem, Japanese officials said. Seaside communities in Japan have tried to capitalise on the menace by developing novel jellyfish dishes from tofu to icecream, but for some reason the recipes have failed to take off.

EDIT

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/T174507.htm