A team of engineers in South Korea has developed a jellyfish-killing robot. (Photo: Reuters)

The worldwide rise of jellyfish is causing a host of problems, from screwing up food chains to the recent clogging of pipes at a Swedish nuclear power plant. One South Korean research institution has come up with a novel solution for dealing with jellyfish: by shredding them with robots.

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Jellyfish are "a great menace to the oceans ecosystem, which leads to drastic damage to the fishery industries," says associate robotics professor Myung Hyun, head of the team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology that created the jellyfish-killing robot. In South Korea, jellyfish have damaged the fishing industry by gumming up nets and feeding on fish eggs. Inspired to do something about the problem, Myung has spent three years developing the Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm, or JEROS.

"JEROS floats on the surface of the water using two long cylindrical bodies," the Institute said in a press release. "Motors are attached to the bodies such that the robot can move back and forth as well as rotate on water. A camera and GPS system allows the JEROS to detect jellyfish swarm as well as plan and calculate its work path relative to its position."

Once the array of robots hunts the jellyfish down with its cameras, it captures them in a net and eliminates them with a special propeller. The first version of JEROS that Myung and his team tested was able to shred about 900 pounds of jellyfish per hour. Their newest jellyfish shredder puts the first version to shame, eliminating 2,000 pounds an hour.

If you feel about the the mass shredding of jellyfish, realize that the suckers have the potential to really screw up ocean life. With the worldwide jellyfish population exploding in recent years, oceans' fish could dwindle, in addition to the already-mentioned problems caused by jellyfish.

"When an ecosystem is dominated by jellyfish, fish will mostly disappear," ecologist Sun Song, director of the Institute of Oceanology in Qingdao, China, told Yale Environment 360. "Once that happens...there is almost no method to deal with it."

Think about that while you check out the somewhat-gruesome video below of the JEROS in action.

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