Consider the Jellyfish

      A couple weeks ago, I was wandering around a beach in Georgia, when I found this. At first I thought it was a piece of trash, then I realized that it was some sort of jellyfish. But what kind of jellyfish was I looking at? My visual experience with these noble invertebrates was limited to the odd translucent blobs that wash up on Long Island beaches by the score in summer, and to pulsating, unearthly aquarium specimens. This was clearly neither option. So, I did what all wired twenty-somethings would do. I whipped out my digital camera and took a picture. Hey, at least I didn’t attempt to use a smartphone app to ID it then and there, right?

     Later on, I began to explore the internet to put a name to my specimen. It was, I thought, quite well preserved, and I was confident I would soon find an identical picture. No such luck. It was only on a third scrolling through of a website on the marine fauna of the Carolinas that I found this image.

 

      Turns out my well preserved specimen was more of a well-preserved fragment, one that did no justice to the elegance of the cannonball jellyfish. According to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the cannonball jellyfish, Stomolophus meleagris, is found throughout the Atlantic and Pacific, and is particularly common on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the southeastern United States. They can get up to ten inches in size, and are the main prey of leatherback sea turtles. Variations in the cannonball jellyfish population may even exert some control on the population size of leatherbacks. Cannonball jellyfish also serve as a food source for humans, although the aforementioned influence on an endangered sea turtle species necessitates regulation of the fishery. Not bad for a lump of protoplasm, eh?

      This is only scratching the surface. The reams of information I found from a simple “cannonball jellyfish” keyword search suggest that we, as a culture, may need to rethink our attitudes towards the cnidarian phylum. What are your immediate associations with the word “jellyfish”? I’m going to guess they run something like “stinging, slimy, stinging, phosphorecent, stinging, tentacles, stinging”. True, jellyfish sting. Most jellyfish produce toxins, although with many jellyfish, the toxin produced is extremely mild and no more painful for a human to encounter than, say, vinegar. This is not to say that you should immediately go and cuddle the first jellyfish you see, of course, as some of the ones that have an extremely nasty sting look exactly like the ones that do not.

     And this brings us to the sheer diversity of jellyfish out there. Jellyfish have been around for over 500 million years. They were likely one of the first complex organisms to evolve, and one of the first free-swimming organisms to exist. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of species occupy environments in every ocean, ranging from shallow estuaries to deep sea vents. Individuals range in size from centimeters-long Australian specimens to tens of meters-long Lion’s Mane jellyfish. Some jellyfish are even found inland, in freshwater rivers and lakes. Far from unthinking blobs of plasma, jellyfish have been found to exhibit neuron arrangements which may perform a function similar to the vertebrate brain and spinal column assemblage. Jellyfish use chemical signaling to distinguish members of the same species from potentially aggressive predatory jellyfish. Some jellyfish have eye organs - the box jellyfish has 24 eyes, spaced in such a way as to give it a 360 view of its surroundings.

     I could go on and on about jellyfish. About the delicate tracery of the moon jellyfish, or the rich colors of the Pacific sea nettle. About the dramatic patterning of the purple-striped jellyfish, or the delicate structure of the white-spotted jellyfish. Jellyfish are best experienced in aquariums, as they contain up to 95% water content and quickly deflate out of water. Those icky blobs washing up on beaches worldwide are just a shadow of the magnificent creatures that have roamed our oceans for eons, and will likely roam our oceans for eons more. Jellyfish remind us of the often hidden nature of biodiversity, and the wonders that may be lurking just under the surface of what we can see.