China Unveils Mass Jellyfish Destruction Weapon To Protect Aircraft Carriers

China has deployed a weapon to defeat its aircraft carriers’ biggest enemy—jellyfish.

Dubbed the "Jellyfish shredder," the Chinese weapon reportedly destroys the fish by cutting them into thousands of pieces and field tests of the instrument were recently conducted, according to South China Morning Post.

An unnamed researcher from the Liaoning Ocean and Fisheries Science Research Institute based in Dalian, northeast China, who was a part of the project, was quoted saying the creation was capable of clearing a passage in the water infested with jellyfish to give the carrier crew “peace of mind.”

Tan Yehui, a researcher with the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou told the publication that the sea creatures posed a serious threat to aircraft carriers because of their size.

The invertebrates could get sucked into a ship’s water intake mouth and clog up the cooling system. This could lead to overheating of the carrier’s engines and bring them to a halt. The process of removing the sticky bodies of the jellyfish could then take hours or even days.

To avoid this process, the shredder becomes a large net of a length of several hundred meters and has a cluster of sharp blades in the center.

It is towed by a boat which travels at high speeds and uses the force of the rapid currents created in the waters to suck the jellyfish into the blades.

The South China Morning Post also cited a paper published in the journal Hebei Fisheries in August which said that the jellyfish were cut into small pieces no bigger than 3 centimeters by the device.

However, researchers also reported that waters become murky about a day after the operation as the fragmented corpses start to decompose and takes up to weeks to clear up. Organic pollutants also peak four days after the operation. They are measured by oxygen levels.

Not just China, but many other countries, including the U.S. have reportedly faced problems due to jellyfish outbreaks of a large scale and frequency in recent years.

For example, RT reported that America’s nuclear-powered super carrier USS Ronald Reagan was taken over by a swarm of jellyfish while it was docked in Brisbane, Australia. The carrier was temporarily disabled after fish were sucked into the ship’s condensers and could only be restarted after technicians managed to clean up the mess they had caused.

“What happened to the American aircraft carrier can also happen to Chinese aircraft carriers,” said Tan .

Other methods to reduce jellyfish numbers were also tested by the team that developed the shredder, the Post report said. One among them was an experiment in which air was pumped into the ocean to create a large number of bubbles. These in turn, lifted the jellyfish to the surface where they could be killed with pesticides.

However Tan also questioned the effectiveness of these the shredder, saying the instrument was only capable of catching relatively large jellyfish.

Researchers from the paper on the shredders also stated environmental concerns like stinging tentacles that could risk stinging bathers when they are washed onto beaches.