The fact that they’ve been around so long says that they’ve come up with a morphology, body structure, and adaptation to survive, hunt, and avoid being eaten, which is supremely elegant. One I saw in Japan has aquamarine disguise on top and maroon disguise on the bottom. A lot are red because, as you go down in the ocean, the red light disappears and they appear black, like a burglar wearing all black to avoid detection. The larger ones, in particular, have developed pigments. Jellyfish can be as small as a few millimeters across, like the size of an eraser on a pencil, or as big as 500 pounds. There’s probably another two thousand hydrozoan jellyfish, which is a cousin group. There are roughly 200 species of the true jellyfish, but as we do DNA analysis we’re finding a lot of cryptic jellyfish. They are certainly the oldest swimmer that still exists on our planet.

They’ve existed for well over half a billion years. What can these apparently simple creatures tell us about evolution? Unfortunately, because of climate change, its range is expanding down the coast of Australia into the Gold Coast, where there are popular surfing beaches. The box jelly, the very toxic one that lives in the Pacific Ocean, can kill a man in three minutes and contains enough sting for 60 men. They are absolutely gorgeous to look at and, you’re right, their bioluminescence is astonishing!īut their sting is vicious! They may not just ruin your time at the beach. In terms of a muse to write about, they live on this line that is both angelic and demonic and nothing about them is clear-cut. I dug in and found there was this excitement and controversy in the literature about jellyfish and how their abundance was increasing in today’s damaged oceans. My PhD is in ocean science, so I love to look into the scientific literature. I thought, “Really? Do we know that for sure?” The winner side was things like algae, microalgae, kelp, and jellyfish. Looking at the losers first, it was all things with shells, which dissolve in higher acidity.

In that story there was a graphic showing the winners and losers in a future acidified ocean. I was writing captions for a National Geographic story about acid seas by Elizabeth Kolbert. It wasn’t actually their beauty that initially got me into it. The highlight of our summers on Long Island is when the moon jellies bloom and we get phosphorescent water at night-jellyfish can make the sea a magical place.

Spineless juli berwald