Lisa ann Gershwin

Career

Gershwin began studying jellyfish in 1992. She was a Fulbright Fellow in 1998-1999 and completed a PhD at James Cook University in 2005.

Gershwin has worked with and for a range of scientific organisations, including CSIRO.

She developed a system to predict blooms of the hazardous Irukandji jellyfish in north Queensland. She led a team that discovered that the blooms coincide with the blooming of salps, and that these were prompted by upwelling after the dying down of trade winds. She has described several poisonous jellyfish—nine species of irukandji, including the Queensland species Malo kingi and Malo maximus, and the giant irukandji species Keesingia gigas from Western Australia, which was discovered without tentacles.

Gershwin was one of the co-describers of the unusual jellyfish Bazinga rieki, which is the sole member of the new family Bazingidae and partly named for the colloquialism uttered by Dr. Sheldon Cooper in the TV program The Big Bang Theory. In early 2014, a giant "snotty" jellyfish some 1.5 m in diameter was discovered at a beach in Howden, south of Hobart. Studied by Gershwin currently, it is due to be described in a future paper.

Gershwin's 2013 book entitled Stung describes the diversity and adaptability of jellyfish, and their increasing numbers at the expense of other organisms worldwide, through over-fishing, pollution and modification of the marine environment. She concedes there is little that can be done to reverse or even halt the process of the marine environment becoming dominated by jellyfish worldwide.

In 2016, Gershwin's 224 page book Jellyfish - a natural history was published by The Ivy Press. It covers jellyfish anatomy, life history, taxonomy and ecology and includes species level information and many full page photographs.

Personal life

Gershwin is related to composer George Gershwin.