Archive for February 9th, 2008

2/9/2008

PANIC! Killer jellyfish invading the seas of Japan!

Warning jellyfish and equally poisonous Irukandji

Killer jellyfish population explosion warning
08/02/2008 – Telegraph
…The really bad news is that the box jellyfish and another equally poisonous species, Irukandji, are on the move….
…perplexed Japanese salmon fishermen are seen hauling in tonnes of box jellyfish in their nets. The few fish they do haul in are writhing in their death agonies after being stung.
….the Japanese government to protect their fish stocks by wiping out the swarms using a fleet of commandeered fishing boats to drag razor-sharp wire through them backfired spectacularly…because they are genetically programmed to ensure their survival by producing more offspring than normal when under attack…jellyfish are multiplying in the Western extent of the Pacific ocean and threatening 20,000 miles of coastline off Japan...more...

The Telegraph reporters were smoking jellyfish when they wrote the above article. Jellyfish are multiplying wildly because of overfishing but box jellyfish, Habu-Kurage in Japanese, were not the type of jellyfish the government tried “to protect their fish stocks” from—it was 450lb/200kg Nomura’s Jellyfish aka echizen kurage and I reported on them back in 2005 in Attack of the giant jellyfish! (2005) as you see below.
slimy jellyfish

The the real problem jellyfish is not that they are poisonous but they’re just too numerous. As in the below photo I took last summer, just take a peek over the edge of a dock on Tokyo bay. Any place where the waves are somewhat still, amongst the Japanese-love-of-nature litter, the water looks like you could walk across it over the seething mass of jellyfish.
tokyo-bay jellyfish massing

Posted by Taro in General, Science/Technology | 1 Comment »

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2/9/2008

GUNDAM girls. . .

Yesterday I reported on GUNDAM, 28 Years After so I thought I would also mention the Gundam-esque “The Four Cutie Fighters“ exhibition of photographs by the “LAYER Project” that was held at Tokyo’s ritzy Aoyama Gallery.
layer-project gallery Gundam girls

A rough translation of the artists’ Introduction webpage shows the purpose of this project was to create, “an expression of new eroticism as a refined art.”
The artist, Hiroyuki Hayashida, writes that he is, “groping for a new eroticism that is sensitive to the changes to Japanese society.” His LAYER Project’s theme in this exhibition is “transformation,” a process in which, “four female high school students disguise themselves as a squadron of heroines.”
Ri-i-ight, whatever.
gallery Gundam girls