Jason Horowitz
Jellyfish seek Italy's warming seas. Can't beat 'em? Eat 'em.
MARINA di GINOSA, Italy — As a small boat loaded with wet suits, lab equipment and empty coolers drifted into the warm turquoise sea, Stefano Piraino looked back at the sunbathers on the beach and explained why none of them set foot in the water.
“They know the jellyfish are here,” said Dr. Piraino, a professor of zoology at the University of Salento.
While tourists throughout Europe seek out Apulia, in Italy’s southeast, for its Baroque whitewashed cities and crystalline seas, swarms of jellyfish are also thronging to its waters.
Climate change is making the waters warmer for longer, allowing the creatures to breed gelatinous generation after gelatinous generation.
The jellyfish population explosion has blossomed for years, but got a special boost since 2015 with the broadening of the Suez Canal, which opened up an aquatic superhighway for invasive species to the Mediterranean.
The jellyfish invasion has now reached the point where there may be little do but find a way to live with huge numbers of them, say scientists like Mr. Piraino.
Jellyfish are still treated, literally, like trash. The European Commission’s research and innovation branch recently considered jellyfish blooms, along with aquatic debris and pollution, a form of litter that posed “huge and increasing problems in the oceans, seas and coasts.”
The Rhizostoma pulmo, sometimes called the barrel jellyfish, spotted here off the shores of Apulia, southern Italy. It can sting and its numbers have blossomed along with other species in the Mediterranean. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
The commission made funds available for researchers with innovative methods to clean the waters. Dr. Piraino and his team have answered the call.
Convinced that climate change and overfishing will force Italians to adapt, as they once did to other foreign intruders, like the tomato, his team has launched the Go Jelly project, which roughly boils down to, if you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.
The study, which officially gets underway in January, will attempt to show that the enormous and increasing jellyfish biomasses can be the inexhaustible Jell-O of the sea.
While overfishing, warmer seas and pollution may wipe out ocean predators, they are allowing jellyfish to thrive — and reproduction comes easily enough to jellyfish.
They can be self-reproducing hermaphrodites, clone themselves, lay up to 45,000 eggs a day, sprout from polyps, and split in two. When a power plant in Japan tried to solve its jellyfish problem with a grinder, they only exponentially increased their problem.
“You can’t reduce their number,” said Dr. Piraino, adding that you can hope only to contain them.
To protect bathers from stinging species, Dr. Piraino has led several European Union-funded jellyfish studies, (“I ran JellyRisk,” he said) set up a global jellyfish spotting campaign, and protected beaches from inedible poisonous jellyfish with state-of-the-art, jellyfish-proof netting.
The problem is bigger than Italy. More than 30 million euros of tourism revenue is lost a year along Israel’s Mediterranean shore.
“Imagine a biomass the size of the world’s largest oil tanker cruising along the coast,” Dr. Piraino said.
In 2013, outbreaks of jellyfish forced the shutdown of a nuclear power plant in Sweden. In the Irish Sea, they decimated salmon fisheries.
In Sicily, where a young Dr. Piraino first came head to soft-bodied head with his life’s work (“it was not a positive first contact”), they have clogged fishing nets and colonized beaches.
Dr. Piraino has plumbed the mysteries of the creature, more than half-a-billion years old, for its possible uses. Those include the potential to fight tumors, and also using collagen-heavy species as a source for more voluptuous lips.
Then, there is food.
Antonella Leone is a researcher at Italy’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, and since about two months ago, Dr. Piraino’s wife. At their wedding this summer, the couple celebrated with a tiered cake dripping with confectionary jellyfish.
A leader of the Go Jelly project, she thinks that Italians, with their zeal for locally sourced regional ingredients, might just find a taste for jellyfish.
Others already have. The Japanese serve them sashimi style in strips with soy sauce, and the Chinese have eaten them for a millennium.
In 2015, a European Union regulation streamlined the application process for countries outside the bloc that wanted to market foods traditionally not eaten in Europe — like an Asian species of jellyfish — if they proved to pose no risk and had been consumed safely in that foreign country for more than 25 years.
Marco Nuzzo prepared jellyfish at Lo Scacciapensieri restaurant in Lecce, for an experimental cooking session. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
The law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2018, also removes bureaucratic impediments faced by European proponents of homegrown so-called novel foods, including those who favor eating the Mediterranean jellyfish.
But the Italian Health Ministry said that since no member state had a tradition of eating jellyfish and since the local species appeared biologically distinct from their edible Asian cousins with different toxicity levels and variations in stinging cells, the ministry said all the standard European research and safety-control tests needed to remain in force before a Mediterranean jellyfish could ever appear as a wild-caught delicacy in markets or on restaurant menus.
It was for such research that Dr. Leone slipped on her diving fins.
“Look, it’s enormous,” she said as she spotted one species, a pulsating violet-rimmed Rhizostoma pulmo — a.k.a. barrel jellyfish — drifting like a submerged plastic bag.
She dived into the jellyfish-infested waters and returned with nets full of violet globules.
As a tortoise, moving like a shadow in the water, arrived for its favorite slippery snack, Dr. Piraino explained how the changing climate will force people to follow the lead of the turtle or, more specifically, the Italian fisherman who once told him he liked to fry jellyfish and hungered for jellyfish ragu.
On deck, Lorena Basso, another climate researcher who has a grant to study the sexual distribution of jellyfish, used a scalpel and scissors to separate the animal’s bell-shaped umbrella from its tentacles, which glistened in the sun like dripping, translucent cauliflower.
“What she is doing now is taking the gonads of the jellyfish,” Dr. Piraino explained before calling out to his wife. “Antonella. Get me the one with the colored gonads.”
Back on board, Dr. Leone patiently held a jellyfish above a jar, draining it of its stinging mucous, with gloved hands that seemed slimed by innumerous sneezes.
“Would you like to taste it?” Dr. Piraino asked.
Once at their headquarters in the baroque city of Lecce, Dr. Leone put on a lab coat and experimented with ways to conserve the jellyfish.
Freshly prepared jellyfish. The European Union has eased a ban on so-called novel foods not traditionally eaten in member states. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times
She prepared to freeze dry and vacuum pack them and asked a colleague to pull a species from the barrel. He put his hand in but came up empty.
“What are you,” she asked, “scared?”
The next morning, a restaurant near the university in Lecce became a test kitchen.
As the defrosting jellyfish seemed to reanimate under the faucet’s running water, the restaurant’s chef asked if he should salt the boiling water. Dr. Leone told him it would not be necessary. He asked how to cut the tentacles from the cap.
“Like a mushroom,” Dr. Piraino explained.
They boiled the first batch for a few minutes to remove its water and destroy its stinging cells. The chef, with a dubious, hesitant expression, sliced the boiled jellyfish, now cerebral in appearance with a deeper purple hue.
Another cook then slid the slices through a flour batter and dropped them in a fryer. Once plated, they broke free of their casing and insolently stuck out like purple tongues.
Dr. Piraino cut a piece that he said was full of protein and omega-3 fatty acids.
“It’s great,” he said, as it slipped out of his hand.
The chef marinated a piece in garlic and basil for the grill. He prepared another on a bed of arugula next to a sweet fig to balance out what everyone agreed was an intense saltiness.
At the end of the tasting, there were several untouched specimens on the table. Dr. Leone packed the foodstuff of the globally warmed future into a jellyfish doggy bag.
“It’s for my colleagues,” she said. “They are a little skeptical.”
In Italy's drought-hit vineyards, the harvest of a changing climate.
LA MORRA, Italy — On a road winding through the heart of Barolo country, Michele Reverdito pulled his car over and stepped onto a sloping and sickly vineyard.
“Look at the wilting leaves and how small and shriveled the grapes are,” he said, holding a sad bunch of nebbiolo grapes in his hand on yet another hot August day.
The 48-year-old winemaker explained that unlike his own nearby vines, which were old, with deep roots, these vines were unable to tap the earth’s underground reserves of water, leaving grapes vulnerable to this year’s drought and brutal summer sun.
“Nebbiolo means the wine of the fog because you picked the grapes in November,” he said. “Now we pick in September! The world is changing.”
In vino veritas. The warming temperatures, shortening of the seasons and unseasonal storms brought on by global climate change are hastening the harvest of perhaps the most venerable crop of Western civilization.
Wine producers in this prized territory debate the impact on the end product, but there is a general acknowledgment that the heat and hail and the extreme weather in between present an annual challenge.
A 2016 study by NASA and Harvard of grape harvest dates going back to the 1600s found that climate change had pushed harvests dramatically forward in France and Switzerland in the second half of the 20th century.
Other studies have suggested that traditional wine-growing regions in Europe and around the world will become too hot for the berries traditionally linked to their earth and climate, or terroir, and will be forced to adopt varietals built for heat.
The vexing possibilities are worthy of contemplation over a fine wine: What is Bordeaux if it becomes inhospitable to cabernet franc or merlot? What is Burgundy without pinot noir? What if southern England supplants Champagne as a home to sparkling wine?
In Italy, a heat wave this year, given the name Lucifer, is blamed for an expedited picking and reduced yields of Franciacorta sparkling wine. Wine production overall is expected to drop up to 15 percent nationwide.
Here in Piedmont, where an ancient ocean enriched the land with minerals and the sun kissed the hills in just the right way, the Italian news media noted with shock the harvesting of grapes for white wine in July.
The local chapter of Coldiretti, the Italian agricultural lobby, noted that the harvest of grapes for Barolo, which often reached into November, now took place weeks earlier.
“People are picking grapes in their bathing suits and they used to be in gloves and overcoats!” local wine enthusiast Piero Comino, 63, said over a straw-colored glass of arneis in Neive.
On the hills under the Castello di Neive, six workers moved in pairs in mid-August, expertly cutting bunches of pinot nero grapes and dropping them in plastic red crates. A week earlier, they had already cleared an adjacent vineyard of the delicate grapes used to make their bubbly Spumante.
“It’s twenty days earlier on average due to climate change,” Ion Bruno, 50, a worker who has been picking the grapes for the last three decades, said as he clipped a stem.
Drought, more than heat, threatened the grapes, he said, adding that instead of steady rainfall, precipitation now came in downpours that ran off the hillsides and did little to slake the thirst of the vines.
“Decades ago there would be snow on the ground in November,” said his partner Bruno Novelli, 58, as they moved to a new vine. “And now it doesn’t snow anymore.”
Those changes required careful management from winemakers, several of whom said that, if correctly harnessed, the heat could improve their product.
Claudio Roggero, who as enologist at the Castello di Neive, decides, among other things, when to pick the grapes, strolled with satisfaction through the corridors of vines, saying the grapes looked perfect.
“If I left these grapes another week they could have been like this,” he said stopping in front of a rare sunburned bunch. “It’s very dangerous.”
In the middle of August, a barometer planted in one of their vineyards showed heat in excess of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. “It went off the charts,” the wine estate’s owner, Italo Stupino, 81, said as he looked over the hills.
Mr. Stupino also pointed at vineyards destroyed by a hailstorm in April, and yet he expressed doubt that global warming drove the change.
“I believe it up to a certain point,” he said with a shrug. “The temperature goes up and down. We had hail in April and I remember some hot, hot Augusts as a boy.”
That sentiment ran through the hills.
In Monforte d’Alba, just outside the town square, Giovanni Rocca stepped out onto his hills and happily chewed a grape he picked from his vineyard.
“The grapes are beautiful, the heat’s good for them,” he said, arguing that the vintage, which he said would probably come 10 or 15 days earlier than usual, was likely to yield a lower-quantity but higher-quality Barolo.
His son, Maurizio, 37, also spoke of the benefits of the sunshine. But he added that temperatures in excess of 100 degrees “are not good for the wine — the berries become unbalanced and too fat, with too high an alcohol content.”
He said they knew how to deal with anomalies, but if intense heatwaves became permanent, “We’ll have to plant bananas and pineapples.”
That, of course, would be a tragedy to the world’s wine connoisseurs, who have come to worship this region’s Barolos and Barbarescos, nebbiolos and barberas. The wine has also been good to its best producers.
An enclosed observation deck hangs like a giant helicopter cockpit over the hills of Alba at the headquarters of the Ceretto family, which produces nearly a million bottles a year.
The company’s employees would be out in the fields a week earlier than usual to pick arneis grapes for its wildly popular Blangé white wine, said Roberta Ceretto, 44.
But she was mostly unbothered by the heat, saying that while her employees perhaps wouldn’t be able to go on vacation in August in future, the quality and culture of the area’s wines would survive.
“The dinosaurs didn’t go extinct in 20 years,” she said with a smile.
Not everyone is so optimistic.
In Barbaresco’s wine store, set up in a deconsecrated church, Michela Adriano, a young winemaker, said that while some skeptics think 2017 will be recalled as the vintage of climate change hysteria, some leading winemakers are thinking hard about how to adapt to the new abnormal.
Angelo Gaja, perhaps the area’s most famous producer, has spoken often about the potential consequences of climate change on the area and its wines, Ms. Adriano noted.
And Mr. Reverdito, who has hung green nets to protect his own nebbiolo grapes from hail, said the nets had the added benefit of reducing damage from the scorching summer sun.
He exuded the same passion for his wines — comparing them at times to beautiful women — as other small producers in the surrounding hills.
But he feared that the lack of interplay of warm days and cool nights, of summer and autumn, threatened to overproduce the sugar and alcohol of a Barolo wine that should be elegantly composed, like “a symphony.”
“There is no more balance,” he said, lamenting the vanishing of the seasons. “And this is a disaster for us.”
Rome, city of ancient aqueducts, faces water rationing.
ROME — Rome’s cold, clean water has flowed through ancient aqueducts, gurgled in baroque fountains and poured incessantly from thousands of the 19th-century spouts that still grace the city streets. For millenniums, water has symbolized Rome’s dominion over nature, its engineering prowess and deep, seemingly inexhaustible spring of good fortune.
“It’s a sign of abundance, but also it’s a sign of power,” said Guido Giordano, a geologist who specializes in water at University Roma Tre. “Since the foundational myth of Romulus and Remus coming from the river, water is inherent to the foundation of Rome.”
And now it is indicative of its latest fall.
A severe drought and sweltering temperatures have led city officials to consider rationing drinking water for eight hours a day for a million and a half Rome residents.
The water crisis has become yet another sign of man being at the mercy of an increasingly extreme climate, but also of once-mighty Rome’s political impotence, managerial ineptitude and overall decline.
Rome’s embattled mayor, Virginia Raggi, has vowed to prevent the rationing, even as smaller towns have already resorted to closing some taps. Ms. Raggi, whose administration has been widely criticized as ineffective, seems aware that depriving Romans of their drinking water could potentially sink her.
Since May, the city-controlled water utility, Acea, has rushed to repair 2,000 of its 7,000 kilometers of water pipes, recovering a hundred liters of water per second.
Even as the Acea website boasts “Roma, Regina Aquarum” (Rome, Queen of the Waters), its system has become so decrepit that about 44 percent of the water is stolen, spills out underground or pools onto the street.
The city has lowered water pressure to aid conservation, forcing residents of top-floor apartments to lug buckets up to their bathrooms and kitchens. “Faucets at risk. A run on bottled water,” news programs have blared.
This week, Italy’s health minister spoke anxiously about the havoc water rationing would wreak on hospitals and the sick. On Thursday, Italy’s minister for the environment appeared in the Senate to express his grave concerns about the drought’s impact on lakes, and suggested that authorities should look into cases of water theft.
On June 22, after criticism of her inaction, Ms. Raggi braved the opposition and decided to start a staggering closure of the 2,500 iconic “nasone” — or big nose — drinking fountains throughout the city. As of Wednesday, she had closed 200 of them, according to the water utility.
The city is also fighting a deadline from the Latium region, to which Rome belongs, to stop draining fresh water from nearby Lake Bracciano. The lake provides 8 percent of Rome’s water and has sunk about 1.5 meters, or nearly five feet.
Wednesday morning, technicians measured the water level in Anguillara Sabazia, a small town bordering the lake. Working under a ruined monument dedicated in the 18th century by Pius XI, the surveyors determined the lake had risen about a centimeter after a Tuesday night rainstorm.
One surveyor shrugged and said the change did not matter, and motioned to the banks around him, where a rowboat was beached on newly exposed earth. “It’s dry,” he said.
Nearby, on a pier, Mauro Noro, 42, cast out his fishing line and said the water was as low as he had ever seen it. “They shouldn’t send anymore water from here to Rome,” he said.
But without Lake Bracciano to help quench the city’s thirst, Ms. Raggi and the water utility are at a loss.
This spring was the second-hottest in the last 60 years, and the driest, with only 26 days of rain compared with 88 in 2016. A recent report by Legambiente, an Italian environmental organization, said that rain had declined 80 to 85 percent in Latium compared with last year.
And Latium is far from Italy’s only parched region. Several of Italy’s 20 regions have asked for the declaration of a state of emergency to address deep droughts. The farmers’ association Coldiretti has estimated 2 billion euros’ worth of damage to agriculture.
In May, the regions of Trentino and Veneto in the country’s northeast bickered over water resources. (“The War of Water,” read a headline in the Turin-based La Stampa.)
Some Italians have looked skyward for assistance. This summer, a local agriculture official from Veneto walked from Cittadella to Padova, all the while praying for St. Anthony to open the heavens. In Roscigno Campania, some faithful took the Madonna of Constantinople, known as “the water-making Madonna,” out for a procession.
Those prayers have so far not been answered. But the Vatican, for its part, is not letting a good water crisis go to waste.
In an effort to highlight Pope Francis’ emphasis on the environment, the Vatican on Monday began cutting off water to 100 of its fountains, including the famous ones designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in St. Peter’s Square.
“It’s not like the Vatican is dying of water problems, but we get the water from the same places Rome gets it from, Lake Bracciano and the aqueducts,” said Greg Burke, the Vatican’s spokesman, who acknowledged that some of the closures were symbolic, as the fountains operated on recycled water.
Making explicit reference to the pope’s encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’,” Mr. Burke added, “Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice; that is the message.”
Such sacrifices would have seemed unimaginable a few years ago, or even 2,329 years ago.
In 312 B.C., the city finished the underground Appio aqueduct, and in following centuries, most of the water brought in came from groundwater within a 25-mile radius. The aqueducts poured 186,666 gallons of water a minute into the city, serving more than a million people, according to “The Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City.”
The ancient Romans had their own version of Acea; Sextus Julius Frontinus served as water commissioner for the emperors Nerva and Trajan. Worried about drought and fires, he oversaw the construction of emergency reservoirs. Water leakage was a problem then, too, but vandals and thieves were punished.
Except for a dry spell in the Dark Ages, the constant current of clean drinking water has for centuries astonished visitors to Rome. The water carried by 35 miles of graceful aqueducts from Lake Bracciano to Rome reminded the 18th-century German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of conquerors returning triumphantly to the city.
“It is the most peaceful of benefactors that enters with a like power,” he wrote. “And is received with immediate gratitude and admiration for its long and strenuous march.”
The campaign has gotten tougher. A general lack of rain followed by short but concentrated storms means more surface runoff and less infiltration into the underground water supplies.
Also, the recent absence of snow cover on the Apennine mountain range that is the main source of Rome’s water means less water has seeped into the city’s aquifers.
Beyond Rome, blistering temperatures have set off wildfires that have driven residents and tourists in Sicily into the sea, where boats waited to evacuate them.
Similar disasters have swept southern France, Spain, Portugal and Croatia in this dry, scorching summer. In Italy, firefighters have doused fires across the country, including in areas around Rome.
“Rome must not be left alone to face this environmental disaster,” Ms. Raggi said as she toured one area hit by fire. But ultimately it is the sky, gloriously and frustratingly clear, that has proved most uncooperative.
Even Mr. Giordano, the geologist who studies water for a living, is having a tough time adjusting to the depletion in this ancient land of aquatic plenty.
“I grew up with the feeling that the water in Rome was always flowing,” he said, adding that when news of the possible water rationing hit, he thought: “Wow. In Rome.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
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