Jellyfish and comb jellies are gelatinous animals drifting through the ocean’s water column around the world. So I am sitting in Hong Kong and I ask my waiter, “where it from” and he says Mexico, and I think to myself “really” is this Mexican jelly fish? Worse I think to myself who would serve Mexican anything in a high-end Chinese restaurant!

But after some research I quickly discovered that I was more or less ignorant on the luxury Jelly fish commercial industry. These creatures have been captured in Asia for 1700 years, and are still considered a serious delicacy in Asia. So where should luxury market jelly-fish come from?

Since the 1970’s important jellyfish fisheries have developed in several parts of the world and in particular in Mexico, where cannonball jellyfish Stomolophus meleagris are captured commercially. Also known as cabbage-head jelly-fish you’ll see it washed up on a beach.

The first cannonball jellies were commercially harvested off the Gulf Coast of Florida in the early 1990s, and the industry has flourished. Surprisingly, edible Jelly-fish come from both the North Pacific and the North Atlantic Ocean and are key to the environment yet plentiful.

However most of the capture of this jelly fish species is obtained within the Gulf of California, specifically in the state of Sonora Mexico, and their volumes are ranked as the third most important fishing resource in the state of Sonora.

The fishing season in Sonora is from April to May; a total of 4-5 weeks, and the catch per unit effort is around 3 tons per trip. Although the process is simple, the large amounts of jelly-fish need processing, an intense activity that employs hundreds of people during the fishing season.

Today Mexico is one of Hong Kong’s top ten suppliers of shark fin, seahorse, sea urchin, yellow croaker and bivalves. Notably, several luxury species that are commonly traded with Hong Kong today, such as swim bladder, geoduck and jellyfish, were not part of commercial fisheries in Mexico just ten years ago.

The other prominent countries involved in edible jelly-fish production are Burma,Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand and even China. Maybe why Chinese aren’t keen on Chinese jelly-fish is because the larvae are reared in ponds before being released as juveniles into the sea to grow and mature.

Source: Internet