With the expansion of the Suez Canal, the relentless stream of invaders from the Red Sea will turn into a raging torrent - but there is a way to stop them
IN 2011, workers struggled to unclog the cooling system of a power plant in Hadera, Israel. Thousands of what looked like wet plastic bags were desperately scraped out of the plant's water intake. But still they kept pouring in – breaking up into gelatinous slime and threatening to cut off the electricity supply of millions of people.
The culprit was a large stinging jellyfish called Rhopilema nomadica. It often forms massive swarms, some as much as 100 kilometres long. "When these blooms appear, tourists have to stay on the beach, and fishermen have to stay on the shore," says marine biologist Bella Galil of the National Institute of Oceanography in Israel.
Yet until ...
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