Convinced that climate change and overfishing will force Italians to adapt, as they once did to other foreign intruders, like the tomato, his team has launched the Go Jelly project, which roughly boils down to, if you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.

The study, which officially gets underway in January, will attempt to show that the enormous and increasing jellyfish biomasses can be the inexhaustible Jell-O of the sea.

While overfishing, warmer seas and pollution may wipe out ocean predators, they are allowing jellyfish to thrive — and reproduction comes easily enough to jellyfish.

They can be self-reproducing hermaphrodites, clone themselves, lay up to 45,000 eggs a day, sprout from polyps, and split in two. When a power plant in Japan tried to solve its jellyfish problem with a grinder, they only exponentially increased their problem.

“You can’t reduce their number,” said Dr. Piraino, adding that you can hope only to contain them.

To protect bathers from stinging species, Dr. Piraino has led several European Union-funded jellyfish studies, (“I ran JellyRisk,” he said) set up a global jellyfish spotting campaign, and protected beaches from inedible poisonous jellyfish with state-of-the-art, jellyfish-proof netting.

The problem is bigger than Italy. More than 30 million euros of tourism revenue is lost a year along Israel’s Mediterranean shore.