Azerbaijan: Jellyfish Threatens Caspian Caviar
While the world’s media watches continuing opposition protests Azerbaijan, another danger hangs over Armenia’s eastern neighbor. According to UPI, quoting The Times newspaper, jellyfish accidently imported into the Caspian from the United States are threatening one of Azerbaijan’s most famous exports after oil — caviar.
The mnemiopsis leidyi lives on plankton and it eats so much and multiplies so fast that the kilka, the small fish in the Caspian that feed the larger fish, have been disappearing, the Times of London reports. Unlike the kilka, the mnemiopsis has no predators in the Caspian.
Mehman Akhundov of the Azerbaijan Fishery Research Institute said that sturgeon, the source of caviar, are producing fewer eggs.
‘You can imagine how hard it is for the beluga to feed now that the kilka have gone,’ Akhundov told The Times. ‘When we catch them, we see that their stomachs are empty.’
The original report from The Times goes into more detail.
“It is a monster,” said Rufat, who has fished for Caspian sturgeon for more than 20 years. “If it carries on feeding like this, there will be no fish left.” Since mnemiopsis was first discovered in the Caspian in 1999, its population has risen by an estimated 5,000 per cent.
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But now Iran has come up with a secret weapon to wage biological war on the invader. Iranian scientists have proposed introducing another kind of American jellyfish, Beroe ovata, which feeds on only one thing — the mnemiopsis. They have been breeding the gelatinous assassins in special tanks to adapt them to Caspian waters, which are less salty than their normal habitat. Since the beroe feeds only on the mnemiopsis, they say, it will simply die out once it has consumed them.
They cite the example of the Black Sea, where mnemiopsis devastated anchovy stocks after arriving from America during the 1980s. After beroe arrived in 1997, the mnemiopsis population began to decline rapidly and plankton and fish stocks stabilised. The Azeri Government has called for further research to be done before undertaking such a bold experiment, which risks upsetting the Caspian ecosystem.
