❤︎ Jellyfish Fun Facts ❤︎

Posted on June 30 2021

❤︎ Jellyfish Fun Facts ❤︎

What blooms like a flower, swarms like bees, has no heart, no brain, no eyes, can be as small as a pea or as long as a blue whale, is 95% water, can glow in the dark and has been to space?
 
Any idea?
 
❤︎❤︎❤︎ A jellyfish  ❤︎❤︎❤︎
 
Jellyfish are so weird, but they are also super interesting. When I studied my undergrad we were given the opportunity to hangout with some local jellyfish (Brown 🤎 and Moon 🌙 Jellyfish) in class, and they were so cool!!!
 
Jellyfish belong to a group of animals called “Cnidaria”, which also includes animals like sea anemones, corals and sea pens. These animals are grouped together because they all have these little tiny stinging apparatuses called cnidae. The name cnidae comes from the Greek word "cnidos" meaning stinging nettle. If you have ever been stung by a jellyfish before, you will understand how perfect this name is. If you haven’t had the pleasure, I defs wouldn’t recommend it 😜, it totally hurts 😭!
 
So you know how a group of dogs 🐶🐶🐶 is called a pack, a group of cows 🐮🐮🐮 is called a herd and a group of dolphins 🐬🐬🐬 is called a pod, well when jellyfish hangout in a group they are called a smack of jellyfish ✋💥😂!!! If the group of jellyfish is big and brought together by currents, tides and winds they are called a swarm 🐝 of jellyfish. But if the group is big and in a thick cloud ☁☁☁ (usually caused by spikes 📈 in reproduction 💕) they are called a bloom 🌸🌼🌸.
 
Jellyfish are invertebrates, meaning they don’t have a backbone. They also don’t have a brain 🧠, a heart 💕, lungs 🌀, eyes 👀, or any organs if we’re being totally honest, and they are like 95% water 🌊. So they basically are just a jelly layer with a mouth, an internal cavity, tentacles, oral arms, gonads and a whole lot of cnidae 😱!!!
 
Around 2000 different types of jellyfish have been described, but scientists think there could be more than 300,000 species 😱. That's crazy right 😱!
 
The smallest jellyfish in the world is the Irukandji Jellyfish, it is translucent and its body length varies from the size of a pea  1 - 2 cm, to the size of a mango 15 cm. The Irukandji Jellyfish is found in
tropical waters all across the world including Australia, Bali, Thailand, South East Asia, The Caribbean, Hawaii, and South Africa. 
 
The largest jellyfish in the world is the Lion’s Mane 🦁 Jellyfish, it’s bell can grow to over 2 m in diameter and including its tentacles, it can grow as long as 36 m, that's the same length as a blue whale 🐳😱!!! Its tentacles look a little bit like a lion's mane, hence the name 😉. Juvenile Lion’s Mane 🦁 Jellyfish are light orange 🧡 or tan in colour, and as they get older they get darker in colour becoming red 🎈or brown 🤎. These cool dudes 😎, unlike the Irukandji Jellyfish, are found in cold waters of the Arctic, North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans and the English Channel, Irish Sea, North Sea and Western Scandinavian Waters.
 
Many jellyfish have a super secret superpower, they are bioluminescent 💡!!! Bioluminescence means that they can produce a bright glowing light 💡 when certain chemical reactions occur in their cells. There are a couple of reasons why jellyfish use their bioluminescence; for self-defence, to lure prey, camouflage, communication and to release extra chemical energy.
Some species will start glowing when touched by predators to try and startle and scare them, while others glow mimicking things like plankton, to confuse predators. Totally sneaky cool!
 
When I was looking over my Zoology notes from uni and researching other interesting jelly facts, I came across this super weird info. Apparently in 1991 NASA  sent the shuttle 🚀 Columbia into space with “2,478 jellyfish polyps”. The jellyfish were kept in ‘flasks and bags that were filled with artificial seawater’ (I know, super vague right?), and they were injected with chemicals to make them ‘swim freely’ (again super vague, I couldn’t access the original journal to get more specific info 😕😔😥). Because the jellyfish could swim around freely, they reproduced and the 2,478 jellyfish turned into around 60,000 by the end of the mission. And because only like 2,478 of them were born on Earth 🌏, that makes roughly 57,522 of them aliens 👽 to Earth 🌎. There was a bloom of 60,000 alien 👽 jellyfish in space...
orbiting Earth 🌍!!! The point of the mission was to study the development of jellyfish polyps (babies) to medusa (adults) with minimal gravity, and then see how those jellyfish coped when they came back to Earth 🌏. Growing up with minimal gravity defs caused issues when the jellyfish came back from their mission. Although they looked and had developed normally, the poor little things used weird and abnormal movements and couldn’t really work out what was up and down. Poor little things, damn scientists, being mean to little jellyfish. I guess NASA won’t be raising an army of alien 👽 jellyfish anytime soon!
 
Jellyfish are really beautiful animals, they look so elegant floating in the water and there are so many amazing and fascinating things about them! I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning some cool 😎 things about these cool little dudes 😎. 
 
Check out all the info sources below for lots more info! Just like my post on pangolins, make sure you watch vids, check out cute pics, learn as much as you can about these amazing animals and share your knowledge with everyone!!! Because the more we all know, the more we can help protect these cool little dudes ❤︎❤︎❤︎
 
❤︎ Tiff xx  ❤︎
 
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