Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 241

The result is that animal plankton numbers crashed, which meant
that plant and plant-like plankton multiplied, sometimes poisoning
the water, often depleting it of oxygen. 35 When the anchovies on
which the predatory fish once preyed were then over-harvested, and
comb jellies from the Atlantic arrived in the ballast water of ships in
the 1980s and were able rapidly to occupy the depleted ecosystem, the
chain of destruction came close to completion.
One of the most visible transformations has been the apparent shift
from fish to jellyfish. The fishing trip I described in the second chapter
was the last occasion on which I have taken even a moderate haul
from the coast on which I live. I have launched my kayak dozens of
times in the three years since then and not returned with more than
two fish. This astonishes me in view of the abundance I encountered
when I first arrived in Wales. Then, a single trip would supply as much
fish as my family could eat in the season. On some occasions, in just a
couple of hours, I caught as many as 150 mackerel, as well as weavers,
gurnard, whiting, pollock, codling and scad. (I returned the rarer and
smaller fish.) Those were thrilling moments: pulling up strings of fish
amid whirling flocks of shearwaters, gannets pluming into the water
beside my kayak, dolphins breaching and blowing. It was, or so it
seemed, the most sustainable of all the easy means of harvesting ani-
mal protein. Now, for reasons I have not been able to identify clearly,
that brief era - my first two years in Wales - has passed. I was sur-
prised to discover that the fisheries officials and scientists I spoke to
not only had no explanation for this apparent change; they had no
data either. If there has been, as I suspect, a population crash, no one is
studying it.
Something else appears to have changed. In the past two years Car-
digan Bay has swarmed with jellyish - not the little transparent moon
jellies with which I was familiar, but species I had seen only rarely in
the three previous years. Most of them are barrel jellies: solid rubbery
brutes the size of footballs. Pale and ghastly, they fade the green
depths; sometimes the sea appears to contain as much jelly as water.
(I should emphasize that these are not scientific surveys; I am relating
unquantified impressions. Unfortunately, in Cardigan Bay, there is no
better source on which to draw.)
While the apparent transformation in Cardigan Bay has not been