Interview: Jellyfish boom — threat or treasure?
According to biology professor Jamileh Javidpour, there is a need to look at anti-inflammatory material that might be extracted from jellyfish, or anti-cancer, immune-related biochemicals that exist but were neglected in the past.
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00:00Jellyfish are becoming nuisance for many areas, for example the rate of stinging is increasing.
00:13We have to protect infrastructures in coastal areas to not have jellyfish inside that production
00:20line.
00:22Jellyfish and jellyfish blooms are only a symptom of a disturbed system, however the
00:28problem is rooted somewhere else.
00:31Once we think of getting rid of jellyfish blooms or solve a problem, we have to understand
00:38what is the problem from.
00:40So it's eutrophication, overfishing, climate warming that might be solved to get rid of
00:45the problem.
00:47And once there is a guideline to know how to get rid of them, then we can utilise that
00:53amount of biomass for something good for us, which comes back to the society.
00:59There are examples from East Asia where interest into jellyfish as food is huge.
01:09We should also look at their abilities in anti-inflammatory material that might be extracted
01:16from jellyfish or anti-cancer, immune-related biochemicals that definitely exist in jellyfish
01:24but were pretty much neglected in the past.
01:28But with that I have to also say that we should not do the same mistakes when we started utilising
01:37biological material and not taking care of the population, otherwise we will come to
01:43a problem again to deplete the entire ecosystem because jellyfish resource is available.