The Rise and Rise and Rise of Jellyfish
All over the globe, jellyfish are swarming the coasts in unprecedented numbers. In Thailand, which has long harvested edible jellies by the millions, the race is on to put the stinging drifters on more of the world’s plates.
On a hot, humid day in Samut Songkhram, near where the Mae Klong River meets the Gulf of Thailand, Wanlee Muensawat strolls through her factory, inspecting crates filled with flattened, dried jellyfish. More than a thousand tons of the ghostly plankton pass through her processing facility every year, scooped out of coastal waters by fishermen in the gulf and the Andaman Sea. A little over 20 years ago, Muensawat had her doubts about starting Chockdee Sea Products. “I remember thinking, This is a very smelly business,” she says. She knew, however, there were markets for edible jellies, most prominently in China, where jellyfish are typically sliced into strips and served dressed or seasoned as a cold salad. And in the years since, as the Chinese middle class has swelled—and as culinary interest has picked up in South Korea and Japan—Muensawat has only watched demand climb.
Her workers pull off an impressive feat: turning a creature that is literally noxious into a commodity foodstuff. To do so, they first remove a jellyfish’s frilly oral arms and stinging tentacles. Then they dehydrate its gelatinous bell, sometimes called an umbrella, with fine salt, a process that takes weeks and is essential for scrubbing out toxins. Of the more than 2,000 jellyfish species documented worldwide, only about 35 are considered edible; the rest are too venomous to safely process or not meaty enough to provide a satisfying bite. Chockdee deals primarily with two: the sand jellyfish and the white jellyfish, which are Thailand’s most popular commercially harvested species. The product they ship is a healthy, low-calorie seafood with a crispy texture and a flavor reliably described as bland. It’s full of collagen and has almost no fat or cholesterol.
In a sense, it is a good time to be in the jellyfish business. The drifting invertebrates are proliferating in the world’s oceans, likely benefiting from human-caused disruptions. The boom is not uniformly distributed—particularly for edible species, there are big gaps in available data—but jellyfish population growth is “happening in many more places than it’s not,” says Lucas Brotz, a medusologist (yes, that’s a jellyfish biologist) with the research nonprofit Quantitative Aquatics. The surge, he says, seems to be fueled by warmer seas, which can boost reproduction and expand habitats, along with overfishing of competing species and other factors. Meanwhile, Brotz estimates the world’s annual jellyfish harvest is up from some 500,000 tons in the mid-1990s to 800,000 tons today. That’s more than the global reported catch of lobsters or octopuses.
As jellyfish become ever more abundant, scientists and entrepreneurs worldwide are scheming up new ways to put their quivering multitudes to use. Sometimes the goal is to incentivize fishing as a response to nuisance blooms, temporary explosions in jellyfish numbers that can disrupt fisheries, prompt beach closures, and clog intake systems. In Japan, when blooms of huge Nomura’s jellyfish vexed fishermen, scientists launched a pilot program to harvest the creatures for fertilizer. In Europe, a seven-million-dollar project to commodify pesky blooms included a push to make filters for microplastics out of the jellies’ mucus.
Thailand has harvested jellyfish commercially since the 1970s. Today it has one of the world’s largest operations. But it isn’t exempt from the hassles that blooms can cause. During the rainy season, Muensawat says, jellyfish “come in hordes. Even the motor on the long-tail boat can’t function, because they get stuck on it.”
Staring down a potential future of jellyfish abundance, Thailand’s government has been funding research to help turn the squishy nomad into the next superfood. Or at least a salable snack. Or to find other marketable uses for its collagen-rich flesh.
One group of Thai food scientists has studied ground jellyfish as a wheat flour replacement for healthier crackers. Others have tried making gelatin from processed jellyfish by-products. A recent study explored jellyfish collagen as a remedy for hardened arteries. Another team brought a crispy jellyfish snack called SupperSea to market in both Thailand and Japan.
New products, in turn, require new processing methods, so the Thai government has also funded research into technologies like solar-powered dryers that more efficiently preserve what the fishermen haul in. And to help those fishermen take advantage of hard-to-predict blooms, one biologist, Chiang Mai University’s Maslin Osathanunkul, is experimenting with environmental DNA sampling to forecast where and when edible jellyfish might surge.
Of course, the breakthrough that has so far eluded jellyfish evangelists everywhere is an edible product that consumers outside of Asia might embrace. The hurdles are both cultural and regulatory. Jellyfish have been eaten for centuries in Asia, but in the European Union, for example, they are considered a “novel food,” not authorized for human consumption. When SupperSea co-creator Benjawan Thumthanaruk, a food scientist at Bangkok’s Chitralada Technology Institute, showcased her crisps at a food exhibition in Switzerland a couple of years ago, she says many would-be tasters seemed nervous her snack might be toxic. Once they tried them, though, the low-fat chips—which come in flavors like wasabi and nori seaweed—earned rave reviews.
She would love to see an end to the stigma. “We have problems with health issues all over the world—that’s why we try to find nutritious foods for customers. And when we look at the ecosystem, we also have problems with jellyfish blooms,” Thumthanaruk says. “So why don’t we try to make use of the jellyfish?”
Back at Chockdee Sea Products, Muensawat has a novel food of her own: cannonball jellyfish, a species not found in Thai waters. Muensawat started importing Mexican cannonballs last year, after they went viral on TikTok. The popular videos, which originated with Asian influencers, show creators tasting the blanched blobs and discovering, often to their surprise, that they issue a deeply satisfying crunch. The trend may be nothing more than a passing online fad, but the internet’s tentacles are long, and today’s stunt fare can sometimes become tomorrow’s grocery store staple. For those betting on jellyfish as a food of the future, a social media moment may be just the opening they need.
