POMAL Population Outbreak of Marine Life

POMAL (Population Outbreak of Marine Life) is a research programme of IMBER-JAPAN funded from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The goal of POMAL is to understand the mechanisms of the marine food web responses to natural and anthropogenic forcings and to develop the forecasting or control technologies of the outbreak of the marine life. POMAL is composed of a couple of subprojects. One is the SUPRFISH (Study on prediction and application of fish species alternation) investigating pelagic fish species alternation induced by natural climate shift. The target region is the Kuroshio Extension region in which the drastic change in physical properties in 1988/89 induced successive failure of the recruitment of Japanese sardine and the sequential increasing of Japanese anchovy. The other is STOPJELLY (Studies on prediction and control of JELLYFISH outbreaks). The target species of the STOPJELLY is moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) which forms intense bloom in Japanese coastal waters. It is expecting that the understanding of biology and ecology of moon jellyfish is also useful to understand the mechanism of the outbreak of giant jellyfish originated from Bohai Sea-Yellow Sea.
More than 90 scientists from various scientific disciplines such as climatology, physical oceanography, biogeochemistry, marine biology, marine policy, gather under POMAL and start the 5-years studies from spring 2007. POMAL will contribute to FUTURE, which is a 10-years interdisciplinary science programme of PICES will be launched in 2009.