Credit: André Karwath

Tens of thousands of jellyfish have been discovered washed up on the shores of Ocean Beach, San Francisco.

The jellyfish covered a section of the beach about three miles in length and twenty feet wide.

George Durgerian, a spokesman for the National Park Service, has commented that this strange event was much like “a huge, cobblestone walkway made of jellyfish.” he added that he has not seen anything like this before.

Durgerian reported the incident right away to the Ocean Beach Bulletin. He commented that this amazing thing can be seen by many residents of San Francisco from Pacheco to Lawton streets.

He went on record stating that the cause of this phenomenon could be the tides.

“There was a large swell overnight that may have been responsible,” he explained.

The jellyfish were identified by Durgerian as a common species known as moon jellyfish.

“There were jellfish like you think they look like – large, circular, translucent and gelatinous,” he continued.

The only other time that Dergerian was witness to such an event was around seven years ago on Ocean Beach which involved by-the-wind sailor jellyfish, more commonly known as Valella jellyfish.

‘They kind of look like a windsurfer,’ Durgerian commented..

Durgerian has commented that he can not explain just why the jellyfish beached over the weekend, but said that a park service biologist would be looking over some specimens.

He also mentioned that there is no planned cleanup for the jellyfish, as high tide will just sweep them back out to sea.

The contract crews from BP have marched onwards to Pensacola Beach, cleaning up tar balls by hand, however the national seashore’s supervisors were saving the heavy equipment until the Turtle and Bird mating season was over and done with, lest they disturb them even more than the spill itself did.

For the moment, scores of workers are removing and cleaning away tar balls with their bare hands. Morris commented that the crews are cleaning things away much more effectively now that the weather has cooled down and the laborors now have more experience in collecting the tar balls from the sand.

However, it is now time to stop messing around, and call in the big guns to get the mess cleared away. Jason Bragg, who is in charge of the machine removal of the tar balls from Panhandle beaches, has commented that while the Sand Shark isn’t a “rocket ship”, it is quite thorough, and removes all objects from the sand which are bigger than three millimeters – about the same size as the needles are across in a tattoo parlor.

This machine is eleven feet tall, weighs in at about 35 tons, has a top speed if two miles and hour and is manned by a skeleton crew of between six and ten people. In roughly one day – two ten hour shifts – the machine can clear away an area of sand which is eight feet wide and one and a half miles long. At this rate though, the beaches won’t be cleaned until late 2011 if then…

It has been reported that in the warm, sunny, and usually tranquil beaches of Spain that at least 700 tourists have been stung by small, transparent jellyfish this past week, leading the local officials to rapidly post up warning signs.

The wiggly little invaders have caused “a swimmer’s nightmare,” reports The Associated Press.

The majority of the attacks seem to be occurring the most often near the city of Elche in Eastern Spain, in an area known as Costa Blanca, a rather popular tourist destination for its remarkable white sand beaches.

This past Tuesday alone, 380 people felt the sting from these tiny creatures, comments Juan Carlos Castellanos of the Elche city department for tourism and tourism development.

“In the five or six years I have been in this job, I have never seen anything like this,” Castellanos calmly explains to the AP.

Besides putting up signs warning people of the dangers, officials from Elche are keeping a close lokout for the jellyfish from boats so they can warn the crowds on the beaches when a swarm is approaching.

Meanwhile, just off of the northern coast, in Cantabria and the Basque region, more menacing, and likely more painful, jellyfish-like Portuguese man-of-wars have been inciting their own wave of fear. More than 300 people have had the misfortune of being stun by on those bad boys during the past three weeks, AP comments.

No one knows for sure why the jellyfish are coming up in such immense numbers, but researchers are blaming it on global warming and overfishing practices in the region.

During a visit to a beach in Saint-Michel-en-Greve, Brittany, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced that the French government will pay to have the beaches of France cleaned from toxic seaweed.

“The state will assume all of its responsibilities and will take charge of the clean-up of the worst affected beaches, where there could be a public health risk,” he said.

Local communities in Brittany have long been urging the government to do something about the toxic green algae that has been flourishing on Brittany beaches for years.

Last month, a rider was rendered unconscious on the Saint-Michel-en-Greve beach and his horse died after slipping on the algae, apparently after inhaling the toxic gas hydrogen sulphide released by the rotting weed. Investigations carried out by France’s National Institute for Environmental Technology and Hazards (Ineris) showed a potentially lethal concentration of the gas on parts of the beach. Some stretches had a concentration of 1,000 hydrogen sulphide parts per million; a concentration which can be deadly in just a few minutes. Ineris recommends providing all cleaning workers with gas detectors and ban the public from the beach until its deemed safe.

The green seaweed thrives when the levels of nitrate is high, which means that excess field fertilizers and manure from local livestock flushed into the ocean by French farmers creates an ideal environment for the algae.

The algae problem is not peculiar to France; the same type of green algae is also turning up along the UK coast line, especially in Dorset, Hampshire, West Sussex, and on the Isle of Wight. According to the UK Environment Agency, the algae are a threat to wildlife along the coast and tighter controls on farming fertiliser and sewage plants will be required to starve the algae of nutrients.

Filtered cigarette butts should have new requirements for disposal, says Public Health Professor Tom Novotny after a San Diego State University (SDSU) study revealed filter-tipped cigarette butts to be toxic to marine and fresh-water fish.

According to Novotny and other members of the Cigarette Butt Advisory Group, used cigarette filters ought to be classified as hazardous waste since toxins present in them harm wildlife.

“It is toxic at rather low concentrations,” Novotny explains. “Even one butt in a liter of water can kill the fish in a period of 96 hours.”

Novotny says one way of reducing the amount of cigarette filters in our environment is stronger enforcement of anti-litter laws and non-smoking areas. Fines, waste fees or special taxes are other options, if the money is used to pay for cigarette butt recycling. A third alternative is to force manufacturers to pick up the bill for clean-up costs incurred by their products.

A thrown away cigarette butt is a combination of the original plastic filter and the compounds caught by the filter while the cigarette was being smoked. The plastic makes the filter non-biodegradable and the trapped compounds are toxic until they eventually biodegrades into the environment.

According to Novotny, cigarette butts are the number one littered substance in the world and have been the number one single item picked up on beach cleanup days in San Diego for several years.

“When they unconsciously throw their butts onto the ground, it’s not just litter, it’s a toxic hazardous waste product,” Novotny says. “And that’s what we’re trying to say. So that may be regulated at the local or state level. And we hope people will be more conscious about what they do with these cigarette butts.”

The study was carried out by SDSU Public Health Professor Rick Gersberg.

Picture by: Chris Sanderson, in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.