China's aircraft carriers have a menace: Jellyfish swarms

Engineers at the Liaoning Ocean and Fisheries Science Research Institute in Dalian, China are developing a so-called “jellyfish shredder” to deal with large swarms of the marine invertebrates. According to the South China Morning Post, the device consists of a net hundreds of yards long lined with sharp steel blades. Towed behind a ship, the jellyfish shredder slices any jellyfish in its path into small pieces, decimating swarms of jellyfish and clearing a path for larger vessels.

It sounds ridiculous, but the jellyfish boom is a huge problem and not just for the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Swarms of jellyfish, some as large as an armchair, are becoming more and more frequent and posing a hazard to man-made objects. Jellyfish swarms have closed down coastal coal and nuclear plants in the United States, Sweden, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Japan, as intakes that suck up seawater to be used for coolant accidentally vacuum up large numbers of jellyfish, clogging them. Power plants affected by jelly swarms must switch off to clean them out. In the Philippines, millions of people lost electricity when the 1,000-megawatt Sual power plant was forced to shut down to remove 50 tons of jellyfish.