By Susan Milius
Dissolved jellyfish slime turns out to be like candy for marine microbes. But the sugar high they get from feasting during a jellyfish bloom busts a leak in marine food webs that shunts valuable carbon away from fish.
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Marine microbes munch on the goo that sloughs off various kinds of filmy sea animals. Booms in the jellyfish population — called blooms, which may be growing more frequent — mean an even bigger feast for bacteria. The problem is, that feast doesn’t get very far in the food web, says Rob Condon of Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama.
The slime is ich in carbon, but it’s thin on nitrogen and other building blocks of life. So instead of metabolizing the bonus jelly like the everyday dissolved organic stuff microbes usually eat — “like a hamburger, maybe,” as Condon puts it — the bacteria burn through it like Red Bull. A disproportionate amount of the carbon in the dissolved mucus just gets released as carbon dioxide in respiration rather being turned into more microbe mass, Condon and his colleagues report online June 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.