Jellyfish Blooms: A Beautiful Warning

When they arrived, the reef looked just as Gina remembered it. “I thought, ‘ok, we’ve missed it’ and we just kept diving throughout the week”. A disappointment, for sure, but with so much biodiversity to explore, one that was short lived.

However, 15 years is a long time to spend getting to know a location. And one morning, whilst having breakfast and looking out over the water, Gina got a gut feeling.

“Everyone had planned to do this particular dive on the North Reef, and I just got this instinct that we were going to the wrong dive site,” she explains. “So, much against the will of the people I was out there with, I very persistently talked everyone into doing a completely different dive.”  

As evidenced by the images they captured, it was probably the right call – the water so thick with moon jellies that it became like swimming through soup. “It's the most ethereal dive I've ever been on,” Gina recalls, wistfully. “It took maybe half an hour to really get over the spectacle and get down the lens to start shooting!” 

As beautiful and otherworldly as these images are, they also carry a warning. Large jellyfish smacks are becoming increasingly common, and as they do, they are having a greater effect on human activity – whether that is being sucked into the cooling systems of nuclear power plants, transported and released in ships’ ballast water, or washing through salmon farms in Scotland.

“They have a much wider impact than just being a pest to tourists on the beach,” Gina argues, citing how the increasing frequency of these events is closely tied to the current state of the global marine environment. “It’s not that jellyfish are villains taking over a healthy ocean. They are thriving because we have changed the ocean in ways that suit them. Nutrient rich, low oxygen and warming waters, driven by sewage, runoff, overfishing and climate change, create exactly the sort of stressed habitats where jellyfish do well.” 

Jellyfish are in fact one of Gina’s favourite subjects to shoot, and she explained how a huge driving force behind her work is informing and educating people on a species they might otherwise prefer to avoid. “I think when you have instances of marine life like that, where we perceive them as slightly threatening, we disengage from them,” she explains, “But if we are seeing more of this, we should be questioning why that is and actually looking to the natural clues that we have. If you don't have a connection to it, then what's the driving force to pay any attention to it?”

Images like these demand attention. At a time when our ocean is under critical threat, they capture a snapshot of both what we stand to lose, and what the future may hold. “It’s a bit of a tired cliche, but we understand more about outer space than we do about our marine environments,” cites Gina, adding how deeply problematic she finds this. "It's not that I'm not interested in the great beyond, I'm fascinated by it, but there's work to do here before we look elsewhere.”

Just like a smack in the face, the changes to our global marine environment are becoming impossible to ignore. And we must respond to make a change, before it’s too late.

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Gina Goodman is a multi award-winning underwater photographer, diving instructor, and enthusiastic lecturer in Marine and Natural History Photography at Falmouth University with a deep and genuine love for the marine environment. Find out more.