Whenever I think of jellyfish, I think of the story I read years ago about how they are a recurring nightmare for Japanese fishermen. These guys just want to catch some fish for some delicious sushi, but then massive blooms of jellyfish start clogging the fishing nets, ripping them apart, and sometimes poisoning or suffocating the fish trapped alongside them, ruining the catch.
A team of researchers wants to change that by turning some of those caught jellyfish into something useful. A new study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, brought to our attention by Gizmodo, argues that these blobs could be converted into collagen that can be used in a variety of ways, mostly in cosmetics.
Researchers from the Catholic University of Valencia in Spain studied whether jellyfish accidentally caught in fishing nets could still be useful for extracting marine collagen, a prized biomaterial used in cosmetics, medicine, wound dressings, tissue engineering, and maybe even food products. Specifically, they focused on the barrel jellyfish, a species increasingly turning up as bycatch in Mediterranean fisheries thanks to warming oceans and overfishing reshaping marine ecosystems.
The surprising part is that the bycatch jellyfish worked almost as well as carefully harvested specimens.
Jellyfish Normally Thrown Back to the Sea Might Be Commercially Useful
The researchers compared collagen extracted from accidentally netted jellyfish with collagen taken from jellyfish collected gently by hand. Despite the rough treatment of commercial fishing operations, the bycatch collagen maintained nearly identical structural quality. In other words, the giant blobs fishermen normally throw back into the sea might actually be commercially useful. Now, if only they didn’t ruin the bounty of tuna and whatnot that they drag out from the sea.
This discovery is dropping right on time, as jellyfish blooms are becoming more common around the world thanks to climate change and disrupted food chains that are combining to create ocean habitats that are favorable to species that can survive in warmer, lower oxygen environments. And since fishermen are already spending a fortune in money and labor to untangle these gelatinous sea creatures from their nets, it makes sense to turn them into a profit so they can at least recoup some of the lost cost.
The researchers propose a kind of marine recycling program, where by treating jellyfish as waste, fisheries can turn them into a secondary income through collagen extraction. How very human of us to think something is a meddlesome little pest… until we find a way to profit off of it.
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