Dead jellyfish blooms appear to be vital to the health of many deep-sea ecosystems, based on new research National Oceanography Centre that investigated the speed at which these dead blooms are eaten.

It had previously been thought that when large blooms of jellyfish died that they often simpy fell to the ocean floor and rotted, rather than being eaten, as the sheer quantity excluded the eating of all of the bloom — thereby depleting the oxygen on the ocean floor, and creating a dead zone of sorts. The new work suggests that these assumptions were off-base.

Read the rest of this entry →