Less jellyfish expected in the Balearics this year

MADRID/PALMA
THERE are to be less jellyfish invading Spanish beaches this year, although the population at a global level is growing due to contamination, the Spanish Oceanographic Institute said yesterday.

Ignacio Franco, marine investigator at the Institute's branch in Murcia said that it was the Mediterranean coast which was most likely to be affected although it remained difficult to predict exactly when and where the jellyfish would emerge because much depended on winds and currents.

He said that the areas where the jellyfish are likely to congregate this summer are in Catalonia and in the Balearics but numbers will be significantly less than last year. Franco added that coastal waters off Alicante and Murcia will also get their share but the jellyfish are not expected to reach the shores there until September. Franco said that the Atlantic coast will not be immune to jellyfish shoals and pointed to periods in 2005 and 2006 when there were sightings of the Portuguese Man of War, a jellyfish with a particularly nasty, and potentially deadly, sting.

However, predictions of jellyfish movement in the Atlantic, said Franco is considerably more difficult because of the ocean's vastness and range of currents. He said that to really understand the movement of the shoals, it is necessary to have tracked the jellyfish over a much longer period of time than the Spanish Oceanographic Institute has hitherto endeavoured.

Franco claimed that the Institute only has only had official ongoing records since 2007 whilst other regions of the Mediterranean, such as the Adriatic, have been tracking jellyfish for 30 or 40 years. Observers there have said there are cycles of ten years when there are plenty of jellyfish followed by ones of 4 or 5 years when there are few.