Saturday, April 19, 2014

Fire And Ice


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.



When Robert Frost penned these words in 1920 he obviously had not yet read Lisa-ann Gershwin's book Stung! on Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean.  If he had, he would be sure that the world is going to end in jellyfish bloom.





During our morning commute we enjoy what we call books-on-tape which is really Judith reading aloud to Richard. This week we were spell bound by a review of Gershwin's book They are Taking Over  by Tim Flannery in the New York Review of Books .

In his review Flannery recounts horror after horror from Gershwin's book about the crisis in the oceans and probable causes for the frightening demise:
By 2002 the total weight of Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea had grown so prodigiously that it was estimated to be ten times greater than the weight of all fish caught throughout the entire world in a year. The Black Sea had become effectively jellified. Nobody knows precisely how or why the jellyfish replaced the valuable fish species, but four hypotheses have been put forward.
The first is that stocks of anchovy, which compete with the jellyfish, collapsed because the jellyfish ate their eggs and young. A second is that jellyfish ate the same food as the anchovies, and starved them. A third is that overfishing left more food for the jellyfish, and the fourth is that climate change caused a decline in plankton or promoted a jellyfish bloom.



Thanks to Rietta Hohman blogger and Marine Science Instructor for the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association for helping to spread the word about our project especially to the fish purveyors and restauranteurs who read the Pucci Food blog. Read her interview Judith and Richard Lang Create Beautiful and Thought-Provoking Plastic Art from Beach Trash 

Plastic art
Smoked Salmon from our Cavallo Point Series