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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

The toxic jellyfish are interesting because they are so toxic, but we don't know much about the toxin.

Here's a YouTube clip of some volunteers who gave themselves jellyfish stings. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK_Cl_54Qh8) It looks intensely painful!

> It had presumably arrived in ballast water.

I'm kind of surprised that ballast water isn't somehow sterilised - boil it for 30 minutes or have strong UV lamps in the tank with water filtering over it?

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>I'm kind of surprised that ballast water isn't somehow sterilised

Ballast water probably has too much mass to be boiled cost-effectively. We're talking thousands of tonnes of water in some cases.

UV isn't a bad idea, but probably wouldn't work well for well-protected species like bivalve molluscs. Unfortunately, those are some of the most invasive species that we have -- see Zebra Mussels, for instance.

The toxic jellyfish are interesting because they are so toxic, but we don't know much about the toxin.

Some progress was made on this last year:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/12/12...

It's not perfect, but there are now regulations in some areas around ballast water [1].

http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/invasive/

Ballast water is pumped in from the surrounding water when needed and discharged when it's not. It's not a commodity that's procured on-shore.

For an extreme example, see submarines.

Cost + absense of regulation.

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