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The Warty Comb Jelly in the Black Sea

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The Long-Term Fate of Invasive Species

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Abstract

The warty comb jelly is a zooplankton-feeding species of tentaculate ctenophore native to western Atlantic coastal waters. In the early 1980s, it came to the Black Sea, probably with ballast water from the US East Coast. In 1988, it was already common everywhere, and in 1989, the population exploded reaching a biomass that approached 1 billion tons wet weight. The mass development of the jelly led to the depletion of zooplankton, eggs and larvae of fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. A population crash of anchovies, horse mackerel, and sprat—the main zooplankton-feeding fishes—was a consequence.

In 1997, another invasive jelly, a predator of the warty comb jelly, arrived. By 1999, this species had also spread throughout the Black Sea and mass developed, thereby almost eliminating its prey. Since then, the two species undulate, with only short periods of the year with significant numbers of first the warty comb jelly and then its predator and with limited impact on the zooplankton and fish populations.

Many figures circulate estimating the economic damage done by the invading warty comb jelly to fisheries in the Black Sea. The highest are the most quoted, but are not necessarily the most reliable.

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  1. Swedish Institute for Future Studies, Jarpas, Sweden

    Arne Jernelöv

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Jernelöv, A. (2017). The Warty Comb Jelly in the Black Sea. In: The Long-Term Fate of Invasive Species. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55396-2_18

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