Japan

[caption id="attachment_6060" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Courtesy Tom Murphy VII and Wikimedia via GNU Free Documentation License (http://bit.ly/jL7U)"]http://bit.ly/jL7U)" width="300" height="199" />[/caption]

Michael Casey's lede from Kokonogi, Japan makes it hard to stop reading, eh?

A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.

Dinnertime! Yum, jellyfish again!

That's what it could come to, a leading fisheries expert believes. But first, a few more details from Casey's story for the Associated Press that was published this week:

•  These explosions in jellyfish explosion along the Japanese coast used to occur maybe every 40 years or so. Now they're becoming pretty much an annual affair.
• They're occurring along thousands of kilometers of the Japanese seaside, imperiling the livelihoods of Japanese fishermen.
• These jellyfish blooms are thought to be increasing along with climate change, (although I have to note: that could be correlation rather than causation. Read on.)
• Another factor that could be at work is overfishing of the jellyfish's predators.

According to the National Science Foundation, jellyfish are about the only living creatures in some 400 ocean "dead zones" around the world. This suggests that they survive pollution better than other creatures.

With the timber industry in a severe downturn, one Indian tribe has found a thriving market for its wood -- Japanese homebuilders. The trick for the mill on the Warm Springs Reservation in north central Oregon was to re-tool the mill to cut in metric lengths and widths, Anna King reports for Oregon Public Broadcasting.