The Times headline: "Frolicking Visitor Delights Hearts, Then Dies"
Newspaper cynics.
- tom moody 4-19-2007 9:53 pm [add a comment]

"You hope that something good has to happen, because it turns out these are days for tears."
- sally mckay 4-19-2007 10:34 pm [add a comment]

That canal is still toxic, I don't know how anyone's heart could have been delighted given the almost certain outcome.
- tom moody 4-19-2007 10:40 pm [add a comment]

whales in harbours is generally a bad sign
- sally mckay 4-19-2007 10:41 pm [add a comment]

when we lived over there i used to see jellyfish all the time in the canal, so it can't be that bad. though i've also seen some shady looking dumping from whatever that is there at smith and 9th, followed the next day by some epa people taking water samples. i guess someone else was more responsible than i and reported it.
- linda 4-20-2007 2:39 am [add a comment]

im not a fish doctor marine biologist but somehow id imagine jellyfish to be more adaptable than whales. lets see what the magic google machine has to say.

Also, says Graham, "Jellyfish play unique metabolic tricks" -- tricks that favor their survival in polluted waters like those of the gulf. The creatures are more than 95 percent water. (Humans are 65 percent water.) Dissolved within their fluid tissues is oxygen that fuels them when they enter the infamous Dead Zone -- 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico that becomes oxygen-starved during the summer. In the Dead Zone, oxygen is consumed by the decay of massive algae blooms, which are fertilized by the tons of fertilizer, sewage, and animal waste that continuously wash into the gulf, primarily from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. Most creatures, such as fish, shrimp, and crabs, either flee the Dead Zone or suffocate. But jellyfish, equipped with their built-in oxygen supplies, thrive in the Dead Zone and banquet on the ubiquitous plankton.

from further into the article:

When I tell Monty Graham about my own experiences swimming off Long Island over the years -- watching the jellyfish bloom even as medical waste, sewage, and garbage-barged debris washed ashore more and more frequently -- he says that he can't tell me whether the pollution and the jellies are related. All he can say is that it's a good possibility.

well, there's hope
- linda 4-20-2007 4:30 am [add a comment]

The Gowanus and other NY waterways have improved considerably over the last generation, but any cetacean that enters NY harbor probably has (as we used to say of acid casualties) a preexisting pathology. After three winters in Bay Ridge I’ve seen exactly one marine mammal, an unidentified porpoise or dolphin seen winter-before-last just east (i.e. oceanward) of the Verrazano Bridge.

- alex 4-20-2007 5:43 am [add a comment]

i dont remember jellyfish the the gowanus but 1000's of tiny fish i used to take ryley to see
- Skinny 4-20-2007 4:38 pm [add a comment]

Humphrey the Humpback

- mark 4-20-2007 10:30 pm [add a comment]