It s like having to sift through all the spaghetti to get to the good stuff, three or four meat balls. Feeding difficulties aside, Lacouture says there is still enough food for the copepods, but their numbers have nevertheless gone into a steady dive. Not sea nettles, but non-stinging comb jellies. They love copepods, and over the last five years or so there s been a steady rise in comb jellies out there, as the scientists data bases and many a Bay fisherman will tell you. Again, the records, or weather reports this time.
Comb jellies proliferate best when brackish water is diluted just what s been happening in the Bay.
Less salt in the water retards the development of sea nettles, arch enemy of the comb jellies, thus touching off a surge in comb jellies population. Mother Nature and man s pollution may be natural enemies, Lacouture says, but in this case they are allies, ganging up against Chesapeake Bay. We d never have come up with this possible explanation of malnourished rockfish, Lacouture says, without all these data changes in species population and salinity in the water and the like. By Robert C. Radcliffe. Bob Radcliffe, a charter member of the ERC Advisory Committee, has been a wire service, newspaper and magazine reporter and foreign correspondent for forty years.