- Like did you know that they aren't fish?
What do you know about jellyfish? Today is National Jellyfish Day and a bunch of fun facts to go with it.
- Jellyfish do not have scales, gills, or fins like fish because they are not fish.
- They are 98% water.
- Jellyfish have one orifice that does the job of both the mouth and the anus.
- The animal is known as a simple or “primitive” animal.
- A 2019 study says scientists discovered that one species sprouts a new anus every time it poops.
- A group of them is called a bloom or a swarm, but they can also be called a “smack.”
- Seeing a group is very rare as they are considered lone drifters.
- Each box jellyfish reportedly carries enough venom to kill more than 60 humans.
- Some are so tiny they are practically invisible floating in the ocean’s currents, like the genera Staurocladia and Eleutheria, which have bell disks from just .5 millimeters to a few millimeters in diameter.
- The Lion’s mane jellyfish can extend its tentacles as far as 120 feet. Did you know this about jellyfish?
- They are edible and are eaten as a delicacy in some places like Japan and Korea. The Japanese have created a candy: A sweet and salty caramel made out of sugar, starch syrup, and jellyfish powder. More often, they’re served in salads, fried into crunchy noodles, or eaten with soy sauce like sushi.
- They have been to space. Nasa first started sending the species to space aboard the Columbia space shuttle in the early 1990s to test how they might
adapt to a zero-gravity environment. Like humans, they rely on specialized gravity-sensitive calcium crystals to orient themselves so studying how they react could reveal more of how humans may fare. - They are a type of ‘cnidarian’, which is named after the Greek word for “sea nettle”
- Jellyfish have hydrostatic skeletons meaning their bells have fluid and circular muscles.
- They can propel themselves along by contracting their muscles and squirting water in the opposite direction from where they want to go. They can also just drift along with the ocean’s currents.
- They have very short lifespans. Some smaller jellyfish only live for a few hours and even the largest species, Lion’s Man, only lives for a few years.
- The Irukandji jellyfish can be as small as one to two centimetres with a bell only a few millimetres wide.
- The largest species, Lion’s Mane, can grow up to two metres wide and have tentacles as long as 36 metres!
- Some can de-age themselves. When they develop, they are a
polyp. Then they become an ‘ephyra’ and then an adult ‘medusa’.If the it’s injured or starving, or in water that’s too cold or hot, an adult Turritopsis dohrnii can drop to the seabed and become a polyp all over again. Wow! What a crazy fact about jellyfish! - Box jellyfish have eyes and can see, rather than just sense light. They have 24 eyes spread across all four sides of their bell, giving them 360-degree vision.
There is so much more to learn about jellyfish. For more, follow the link and read There Are Many More Jellyfish Fun Facts For Today.