Barrel jellyfish invasion
The summer of 2024 was the hottest since temperatures have been measured, and it’s not just the thermometer and measurement statistics that tell us this. As you can see in the video, this year too there was the usual, now inevitable, proliferation of jellyfish due to the increasingly warm sea temperatures. Barrel jellyfish invasion Rhizostoma pulmo Invasione di Polmone di mare www.intotheblue.it
According to the latest data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the global average temperature calculated between September 2023 and August 2024 is the highest ever recorded for any 12-month period. This means that the summer of 2024 is the hottest ever recorded, both globally and in Europe. And that’s not all: according to models from previous years, it is likely that the trend will not reverse in the coming months, thus making 2024 the hottest year ever recorded.
According to Copernicus data, August 2024 was the warmest on a global scale, with an average surface air temperature of 16.82°C, the same as August 2023. This record-high repeated heat for the month of August for two years in a row is 0.71°C above the average temperature for the period between 1991 and 2020 for the same month. Compared to pre-industrial levels, August 2024 is 1.51°C above average.
https://www.renewablematter.eu/estate-2024-caldo-record-temperature-piu-alte-mai-registrate
On intotheblue.it and intotheblue.link we have often addressed this topic, in this case the invasion of jellyfish concerns the species Rhizostoma pulmo, sea lung or barrel jellyfish, a scyphomedusa of the Rhizostomatidae family, but as often happens the phenomenon does not concern just one species. In fact, we also encountered the infamous purple jellyfish, luminous jellyfish (Pelagia noctiluca), a jellyfish of the Pelagiidae family, to be clear, the one whose burns and irritations we report during bathing on our summer holidays.
While the sea lung is practically harmless for us bathers, the purple jellyfish is one of the most dangerous jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea, certainly the most dangerous among the endemic ones, so it is best to avoid any contact even when we find it beached.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizostoma_pulmo
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagia_noctiluca
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