They say that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade...but those wise sages tucked away in the phrase coining department never came up with rule of thumb for what to do when your region is swarmed by massive 6 foot wide, 485 pound jellyfish monstrosities. Fortunately, residents in Nomura, Japan took matters into their own hands by creating a curious selection of bizarre jellyfish edibles, the likes of which you and I have surely never tasted.

Of course, the first question on most people's minds is why so many of these alien-looking sea creatures have clogged up the waters of the Yellow Sea (off China and the Korean peninsula) in the first place. Not surprisingly, everything from ocean pollution and overfishing to global warming has been cited, but scientists aren't exactly sure which is the true culprit or if it is more likely a combination of all the above. What makes the giant jellyfish particularly pesky and challenging to mitigate is that in addition to their poisoning capabilities, their instinct when under attack is to release a vast amount of sperm and eggs, ensuring the proliferation of their species.

Ultimately, hundreds of Echizen Kurage were captured in fixed nets and then boiled down into a thick paste which was dried and converted into bitter-salty powdered form. Remarkably, the entire process was developed by school area children attending the Obama Fisheries High School. The eau de jellyfish powder was then used to create Ekura-chan saku-saku cookies, priced at a whopping $6.36 US (580 Yen) for a modest 10 pack.

But wait -- there's more! Faced with such a large volume of jellyfish powder, the students got even more resourceful creating raw caramels -- not with the traditional ingredients of butter, light corn syrup, sweetened condensed milk, dark brown sugar and vanilla -- but instead with sugar, starch syrup, and jellyfish powder. Who's going to be interested in such curiously chewy tidbits from the sea? Capitalizing on the raw caramel craze that has hit their region, the students decided to set their sights high by appealing to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), that's who. The salty-sweet treat is at this very moment being evaluated by the agency, and if they think that it's up to snuff, it will be included on the official astronaut menu for those aboard the International Space Station.