a podcast brought to you by Aquarium of the Pacific Southern California's largest aquarium. Join us as we learn alongside the experts in animal care, conservation and more.
Welcome back to Aquarium of the Podcific.
I'm Erin Lundy, conservation coordinator for mammals and birds and animal care specialist.
And I'm Madeline Walden, the Aquarium's Digital content and Community Manager. Erin, What are we gonna learn about today?
I'm pretty excited. We're gonna learn about something I know next to nothing about which is jellies.
Jellies? Jellyfish?
jam, PJs, jelly sandwiches.
I don't know I don't know why they're not called Jelly fish. I know that we often correct our the way that we speak about them to say jellies rather than jellyfish. And I think it has to do with what is a fish, which is actually a surprisingly existential question for an aquarium test.
Yeah, is a jellyfish a fish?
We do get asked that question a lot. Why are sea stars not called starfish? Why are jellies not called jellyfish? And to be honest, I actually don't know the answer to that question. So thankfully, we have an expert here. An expert on his name, full name full birth name is Jelly Josh. I'm lying. But wouldn't that be cool?
That's what we call him at least
Affectionately so, although I'm not sure how affectionately affectionately it's received, but jelly Josh. Josh is our resident jelly expert. He has raised many of our jellies from conception to birth, whatever it is that jellies despond again, I know next to nothing about jelly to find out so thankfully, we have him on to answer all of our burning jelly questions, because
maybe a little bit burning too, because those guys sting sting.
Some don't hurt though.
Yeah, so we have jellies here at the Aquarium where you can touch them and a lot You can't touch but you can actually touch our moon jellies out on harbor terrace and technically they're stinging you. We just have very strong human skin. But if we were tiny, teeny, tiny brine shrimp, it would not be Oh, you feel it? Maybe maybe not for long, but
I guess we don't really know a lot about what brine shrimp feel. We have a lot of questions. We have a lot of can't wait to get into it. Let's bring on Josh.
Okay, welcome Josh to the podcast. Hi, Josh.
Hi. How's it going?
Good. How are you?
I'm doing awesome.
What's your job here at the Aquarium.
Thanks for announcing me as Jelly Josh as we had prepared. So that would
I was waiting, I was... Alright, go ahead.
So yes, my job here at the Aquarium is that I'm a senior Aquarist. I'm in charge of cold water and temperate water jelly husbandry. So basically I take her the majority of the jellies we have here at the Aquarium.
So you're Jelly Josh.
That is indeed my name
I love alliteration. We had some alliteration on one of our other
We can't stop.
I think it was water weasel and now we have Jelly Josh. Thanks, Josh. How long have you worked here?
I started out as an intern. So I'm going on at about 12 years, which I've been with the Aquarium of the Pacific, basically right out of college or when I was a senior in college is when I got my internship. And then I continued volunteering because I thought it was a lot of fun and eventually got hired part time and then full time. It was always kind of related to jellies kind of randomly when I started. When I started as an intern I really didn't know anything about jellies except I liked them I thought they were cool. I was kind of interested in keeping them at a home aquarium so I bought a book to kind of learn about them and they randomly placed me in the My internship it at with the jellies and just thought was a lot of fun. So that's where I volunteered I got hired as a part time life foods aquarist so basically the person in charge of making the food for the jellies so I was still kind of attached to that department. And yeah eventually kind of just worked my way up and because I that was 12 years ago and now I'm a senior Aquarist doing all the jelly stuff.
Now you're jelly Josh, Josh.
So what makes a jelly a true jelly?
So if you use the terminology true jelly, you get down to like what jelly is you're talking about? There's different types of jelly is what we normally call jellies are what we call scyphozoans, hydrozoans, and ctenophores. Basically anything that kind of looks kind of blubbly in the water that's a plankton we kind of we kind of term jelly. Only the specimens that are under the scyphozoan family are actually true jellies and those those are like your moon jellies and your and your sea nettles and stuff like that. That's realistically true jellies all the other ones are kind of false jellies hydrozoans, which if you're at the aquarium, those are the umbrella jellies, crystal jellies. Those guys are related to true jellies. But they're not true jellies. Scyphozoans, those are the true ones. Ctenophores, which are the comb jellies, are like not related at all like nowhere near the same family so
Why do we call them all jellies? Why do we lump them that way?
I mean, it's an easy thing to do. Like common names is the common name is a moon jelly. It's just an easy thing to call them. So basically any plankton that's floating out in the ocean that has like I said, it's you know, made of mostly water and jelly-esque look. We call it like a jelly. Yeah, exactly. They'll they'll call a jelly or a jellyfish or whatever
As a jelly Aquarist, do you refer to them all by scientific name? Typically
favorite name. That's what I'll say. That's my favorite jelly name so far.
Can I Can I just spend the whole podcast just listening off?
Yes. I love it.
Yeah, it's great listing off scientific names. I'm sure it'd be great for listeners.
Ithink this is a really fun quiz because I don't what about a sea nettle
The scientific name? Yeah. So they're all under the genus Chrysaora But we have six different types here at the Aquarium.
What is the difference between a jelly and a nettle?
So there's not really a difference. All nettles or jellies it's one of those things like
rectangle rectangle square type thing.
No. All nettles are jellies and all jellies are nettles. That's just a very or you know species of that belong to Chrysaora are sea nettles, which are jellies
And you'll hear us refer to jellies as sea jellies or jellies and not necessarily jellyfish. Correct?
You guys, I will call them jellyfish
Jelly Josh calls them jellyfish, jellyfish. Jellyfish Josh.
But I guess the thinking behind our marketing efforts at least is that they're not technically fish. So why call them jellyfish?
Well, if you want to go yeah, let's go. Wolf eels are not wolves or eels. It's actually a blenny.
You're looking at me like I named them. What do you why did you do that? Yeah,
The one thing that I learned pretty recently with amphibians is that they all have to be referred to by scientific name. Generally, if you're talking to other you know, frog people, because the common names are often incorrect, just like jellyfish, just like things like that. So like we have spadefoot toads, which are not true toads, they're actually a type of frog. And so instead of calling them spadefoot toads, people who work with frogs, we'll call them spadefoots, because that's a little bit easier or refer to them by the scientific names. And a Panamanian golden frogs are actually true toads. And so there's a lot of just common names can be really misleading. And I'm sure even more so when they're jellies because there's so many of them
yeah, it's kind of funny on some of the jellies, if I'll get new specimens in or new species that we haven't done before, like, I will type in their scientific name on Google and they don't have a common name.
Wow. So no one's even talked about them before.
Oh, yeah. No one. No one cares. But like, I'll have to like email other aquariums and be like, what would you guys call them and see what the collective is so that you can and if like, if no one, I'm just like, oh, this is the flip flop jelly just so I can have a common name.
Flip. Which one is the flip flop jelly purple ones. What's the name of the Flippius? Floppious? Flip Flop. Yes, the flip flop jelly.
That's my favorite. Yeah. So I have been lucky enough to go behind the scenes and spend time in the jelly lab. Can you tell us a little bit about what happens in the jelly lab.
So the jelly lab is just generally my backup work area. If you guys visit the aquarium, it's hanging out behind the northern jellies exhibit. And that area is where I do the majority of my work, which is culturing the specimens. So the majority of the the animals that we have on display are not collected from the ocean. They're actually cultured here in house. And the reason we do that is because jellies generally don't have a very long lifecycle or life stage. And so it would be really difficult to collect jellies have them live long enough and then go collect more and then collect more. It's not a great sustainable look. Even though jellies are in no way shape in danger in the ocean or in danger or anything like that. But it's just easier to have a consistent flow of strong animals going into our exhibits, if we're culturing them. And so back there I have what we call wet tables, which it looks like a table just full of water, which I house the cultures
Perfectly named
Didn't know that was a good joke. But uh, but yeah, so so that's where it has how's the cultures and that's where I'm rearing. Like our our baby jellyfish, which which we call it a ephyrae is their fancy name. But yeah, and back there. So I'm wearing them up to display size, generally speaking the baby jellies are ephyrae are about one millimeter, they're itty bitty. And so yeah, rearing from there. So to to eventually get them to display size, it takes about eight months with a lot of species. So So yeah, a lot of stuff is going on in the jelly lab.
What is there like developmental lifecycle like when we see jellies, we typically see this sort of free floating, jelly like thing, but what kind of goes into growing up into that.
So this is a lot easier when I have like something like a picture. For all the wonderful listeners. Yeah, you're gonna see, picture this, if you will. So So I mean jel, or Well, I'll say moon jellies is easy to think about. So what we think of moon jelly is, you know, are the what's called the Medusa stage. And those are those big blobs floating out in the ocean collecting plankton. And those guys will reproduce kind of like corals where they shoot their gametes into the water, eggs will be fertilized by the sperm, those will turn into larvae, which are microscopic, these larvae will actually swim around and try to find a place to settle. So which which they'll do on any hard surface they can find, generally, it's the opener, you know, the ocean floor, seagrass rocks, whatever. And then that'll turn that little larvae will turn into what's called a polyp. And that looks like a little miniature anemone. And so at this polyp stage, what they'll actually do is they'll start cloning themselves. And so you'll start with one polyp, and eventually it'll get to, you know, 50 polyps that are genetically identical. And then at that point, if there is a seasonal cue, and that's what the jellies kind of, kind of, that's what tells them it's time to breed. Or it's usually a temperature swing because of the seasons. And then that little polyp will actually kind of, so I was saying it looks like an anemone, it'll kind of drop its little feeding tentacles, and then start to metamorphosis and then chain up. And that single polyp will actually turn into about 25, little baby jellies, that'll pop off and then into the water column they go to grow. So yeah, so at that point, they'll grow pretty rapidly in the open ocean, because there's nonstop food Nonstop flow, and kind of grow up into become the Medusa stage. And then the process will repeat itself.
Do you ever hear something, and then just go, I knew nothing about that. So what I'm feeling right now where I'm like, generally feel pretty informed about what we're doing here and what our animals go through. And I didn't know any of that. And they're so different than anything else, that it's wild to hear. But yeah, I just clones itself 50 times and makes a million of them out of one. They're all clones, don't worry, but I'm like what is happening. So that is very jarring to me, but in a good way.
It's very cool. As far as their general care once they've kind of Medusa'd they do said, how do you care for an animal with no brain? What goes into that?
No. So so their care because they don't have a brain is challenging. Because like with fish, fish in a fish tank, you know, fish smart, it will swim to the side of the tank, it'll turn around and it'll come back. Jellies do not do that. So jelly is just go with the flow of the jelly finds itself on the corner of a tank, that's where it stays because that's where the flow is, yeah, it doesn't have a brain it doesn't know any better. And so that that provides a lot of challenges. And so we try to combat these challenges with specialized jelly tanks that we use. They're really the animals or so with a specialist jelly tanks, they're generally rounded and the flow dynamic works where the animals are sitting in the middle of the tank, kind of not touching the corners. But so so with these specialized jelly tanks, the the jellies inside them are very sensitive their environment. And so any little stuff that could be growing in a tank is really bad for them bacteria, which you can't see diatoms, which are problematic algaes hydroids, which are stinging cells can all grow in these tanks left unchecked. So every jelly tank has to be broken down, sterilized at least once a month, our bigger cylinder which is around the size of 2200 gallons, so it's really big. We sterilize that one. Once every three months where we have to come in in the morning as a team does it not just me but is I will take all the jellies out of that tank, which there's usually about 80 to 100 see nettles and then we generally drain it down to a bit and then we sterilize it with really strong bleach. And then we have to clean it out. Make sure there's bleach is gone and then set it back up and then put the animals back in. And that's just a reoccurring theme for healthy jellies. Is the sterilization of their exhibits.
So it's just keeping things super clean. And what do we feed them typically?
Oh, what a fantastic question. So, so jelly is, you know, jellies don't eat like jelly flakes like fish do. So they specialize on plankton, they're planktonvores. And we have to mimic that through live foods feeds. So we culture we have a specific aquarist whose job it is to culture, millions of live foods every single day. And so the most common food item that we can offer our what's called brine shrimp, and then so yeah, so we hatch millions of brine shrimp every single day that go out to be to be fed to the jellies. So but not all jellies eat the same thing. Some jellies have to eat larger prey, some jellies update smaller prey. And so we actually have a where we would be culturing moon jellies to feed the other jellies that are what's called a Medusa board, meaning it only eats other jellies. Some of the jellies specialize in eating small larval fish, some of them specialize in eating small arthropods. So yeah, a lot of fat goes into the feeding of the animals. Because what my biggest goal, one of my biggest clothes is to try to mimic their natural diet as much as possible, because that's how you create the healthiest animals. And so I'm always doing research and r&d on how I can do that.
How would a I don't want to say cannibalistic jelly, but how would a jelly that eats other jellies hunt for that jelly??
It's actually the same hunting strategy that all the jellies have. They have their long tentacles that are full of stinging cells, called nematoblasts. And what they would do is they would trail those stinging cells and kind of capture animals that get entangled into it. So then that's the same thing with someone that an animal that would eat other jellies another jelly that is is that it would you know it would trap them with their long tentacles.
We get this question a lot on social media is how do jellies not sting each other in the same habitat? So if they can sting other species, can they sing their same species?
No, they would have to evolve past that. Because if they could sing the same species, they would sting themselves. So so they so yeah, so they do not seeing the same species. So I am able to keep multiple specimens in the same tank.
So are those things cells, they basically have an immunity to whatever is stinging for that individual species? I don't know. Perfect. I just That's right.
I think I read something that said like, it doesn't there. If they're touching the same species, it doesn't fire
I don't know how that would be possible. Right? Because it's tactile based. Yeah, the fire nematocysts so it would fire but the animals wouldn't. Maybe they do feel and they just deal with it.
Like oh, like you do. Which is my next question is how many times have you been stung today? Because I know it's pretty reoccurring. Part of the job
It depends. So it depends where you get stung and the animals that you're dealing with. If I'm I know I can deal with certain specimens I can be more carefree with handling them and then other ones I know it's going to be obnoxious so I am a little more careful. But yeah, it completely depends on the animals that I'm working on
which one has the worst sting of all the jellies we house here so
of all the ones that I've had here the there's a species of sea nettle that we don't have right now called the Indonesian see nettle, and it had a really nasty sting. Scientific name? Chrysaora chinensis But what it felt like is like if you've ever slammed your arm into a cactus, ah really hard. That exactly what it felt like oh, because it was one of those where it it stung and then like shot up my spine because it was so unpleasant much pain Yeah, but and then whenever we really fast like there was no lingering effect but it was obnoxious.
That's unfortunate. But most of the jellies or at least some of the jellies that we have here like we have moon jellies in a touch tank you know like that's something people can just go and touch do they sting?
we do I mean technically they do sting because like I said it's a tactile base that the stinging cells fire, but depending on what they eat, so moon jelly is the real small plankton. That's basically what their entire diet is composed of. so they don't really need a lot of stinging cells to capture a plankton. And so they are firing their their harpoon like stinging cells at you, but it doesn't go through your skin so you can't feel it
Too strong for those moon jellies. Crewella ursella.
It was close, aurelia carelia, but
Thank you, almost!
But But yeah, it's really dependent. Like I said, I want to eat like, says things that eat bigger prey need to mobilize that prey. So because once it can capture, like, say something big like a fish, fish can thrash and that's going to hurt the animal. So it needs to immobilize quickly. So that's why they would have a much stronger venom.
Got it. Speaking of stronger venom, what's the most dangerous jelly?
In the world? So I mean, members of the box jelly family, yeah, basically sting you and throw you into cardiac arrest. So yeah, so luckily, off our coast, we do not have those ones. A lot of people find it interesting to know that we actually do have box jellies off our coast. But they don't really seem that bad. So that's not really a problem. Yes. I have seen reports of Portuguese Man o' War off our coasts, which if they sting you it's real bad.
I've been sung by those. I have I grew up in Hawaii.
Yes.
Number one Man o' War, not true jellies. but we call them sometimes people call them jellies. But they'd be wrong to do that.
So you got stung by a jelly that wasn't
No, I got stung by Portuguese man o' war. They have them a lot in Hawaii. A lot of them were very small, but one time one wrapped all the way around my leg. And I just remember dragging my leg down the beach and be like, MOM, I can't feel my leg anymore. And so they're not great. I agree.
Sorry for calling you out.
I grew up where the Portuguese man o' war were trying to kill me and eat me. And I was very small at the time. So they probably could have actually, how big do they get?
I mean, tentacle wise, they probably reached six feet. Yeah, crazy. Yeah. A little swimming bladders, probably like four inches.
So this question came in from social media. What should you do if you get stung? What do you do when you get stung? Just kind of roll with it?
Yeah, I just kind of go along with my day
don't recommend that you
build up an immunity to this things over time?
I don't know if that's true or not. Do
you feel like you have? Are you superhuman?
The most pathetic power of all time. Stinging is not as bad.
It's fine, sometimes I have to go home early
My superpower is it doesn't hurt quite as much yesterday.
But now I don't know if that's an actual what was my question I supposed to answer.
What do you do? What do you do if you get stung by a jelly? Best thing
Best thing to do? Generally, you're at the beach. If you do that, go to the lifeguard station. Yeah, that's your best answer. Vinegar stuff can help neutralize the sting. So like if you're at the beach and someone has a picnic, you can throw like mustard on it. Yeah.
A little salad dressing
Your best bet is to splash it with seawater to get the singing cells off your body. So I assume you guys are leading me into talking about peeing on it. You don't have to pee on it. That makes it doesn't work.
An urban legend.
Speaking of those stinging cells. So after the jelly stings, the stinging cells can remain. Yes. So has there ever been a time where you might have had stinging cells on you? And yeah, so that's leading you into a story I already know about.
Oh, totally. But yeah, so that's that's realistically for me my day. That's how I get stung the most is that my hands generally don't feel it and I don't think about it. And then Yeah, that's exactly what's so so. Yeah. So the story that you're leaving on me about is so there was one time in my early jelly career is we were looking for jellies out in the ocean and we spotted a really big egg yolk jelly, an egg yolk jelly, they they can have a bell that's more than 15/18 inches long. And that's just the bell so tentacles, tons of them. They specialize in eating other jellies. So they they'll encompass jellies with their tentacles, that's how big they are. And so I flopped out of the tank or out of the boat, and I kind of grabbed that guy and put them into a bag and handed it up to the deck. And so when I jumped back onto the boat, you know, I did a good job and I had all my scuba stuff on or my wetsuit and my all my gear on and what I did was I took off my mask and then I took my hand which I use to capture the jelly with with a glove, and then wiped all the water out of my eyes just running all the nematocysts right through my eyes. Causing really bad sting. It was really painful. I had to try to splash it with water to try to get them out of my eyes. But that's probably my least favorite jelly encounter I've had
Hopefully a mistake you only make once. Yeah, definitely want that to happen again. So you've worked with a number of species of jellies at the aquarium is there a jelly that you haven't worked with that you would like to
dream jelly?
There's actually tons and tons. But uh, so it's kind of like one of the fun things that that I find in my job is that there's just any unlimited amount of like, I will just find this interesting jelly and then become obsessed with it and be like, that's the one I got to do next. It's so awesome. But uh, but yeah, realistically, like box jellies would be a lot of fun. I am not silly and would go after like the worst stinging ones, I would go after the mildely stinging ones. But I think it would be an awesome, awesome story that we could tell to our guests in an awesome species that we could actually bring in to show them which which I think it's cool that jellies that have stories that I can kind of kind of teach the public about just
You hear box jelly, and there's so much, so many things in pop culture, and just like movies, even that reference, that species being so deadly, and the fact that, you know, we have them off our coast here in Long Beach, but it's a different type and it's not necessarily deadly. It's fascinating. Okay, cool. So we collected some questions from Instagram to chat with you about so why does our ecosystem need jellies? What is their purpose? What is their role in the ocean?
Um, so So the role of jellies is generally like keeping plankton numbers in check. Jellies generally can, it's a really delicate ecosystem that jellies live in. So they they are a food item for a lot of a lot of species. Mola Molas are the best example of that. If you guys know what that is, it's the ocean sunfish. They're the cutest fish.
they're objectively the cutest fish. Yeah.
But yeah, so those guys specialize in eating eating jellies. So they're important for them. There's other species of like butterfly fish and stuff like that. Sea Turtles too sea turtles. Yeah. A real obvious one that they Munch down tons of jellies. But yeah, so they're they're important food item for other species. And but because the ecosystem is so delicate, if you get a big, what we call a smack of jellies, but it's what we call a bloom of them as well. They can actually really tear down the plankton ecosystem. So it's really important to keep the animals in check.
Yeah, they're all connected if the predator isn't predator-ing.
Yeah, so some of the species that I like to work with are ctenophores and one of the things that I learned with our comb jellies that we have is that they are really easy to be introduced into other ecosystems and the Black Sea, they somehow got introduced. It's usually ballast water from ships. So it's not intentional, but it would bring them in. And they would reproduce because they have no predators. And they would out compete the not necessarily compete, but they would eat the fish larvae and cause real huge issues with the fish populations, because there's so many of them eating them, and they couldn't get back past their plankton stage. And so what they ended up doing, which, by every paper I read, seemed like it worked, was there's a species of ctenophores that specializes in only eating other ctenophores, which is called Beroe. And they introduced the Beroe to eat up all the comb jellies, and then after that, I mean, I'm sure the Beroe starved. But, uh,
We have Beroes or we've had had Beroes here
we have that's a that's a one of my favorite species actually to work with or Beroe the reason for that is they're just so challenging and then like it's another one like I don't know how to explain it on podcast but they're hilarious looking
Do jellies in a smack communicate with one another?
No. Great. Next question. Awesome.
Why would they not communicate with one another? Because they
Because they do not have the brain, so jellies are notorious for being brainless and spineless.
How are they able to stay to get as it kind of like we're born together and we're just going to float together. So this ocean
Kinda, yeah, like realistically like so they are going to be born together because they're coming off. These true jellies are coming off of the As those polyps that have been settled, and so because they just follow the currents currents are very consistent in the ocean, you can find a map of the currents and you can see they will all follow the same currents. And that's generally why you find huge smacks of jellies on the ocean.
We're all in this together. What makes some jellies glow? And do you think that aids or hurts them when it comes to their predators?
So yeah, a lot of jellies do glow. And what it is, is it's so they'll have the bacteria in their tissue where if they are going and actually it's eating them, so what they're doing is they'll glow into the moonlight to attract plankton in. A good example of this is the flower hat jelly, which, which is a real popular jelly that we have that we don't currently have, hopefully, soon, we'll get more, but they actually at the tips of their tentacles will they'll sit at the ocean floor at nighttime, and the way of the tips of their tentacles around which have glowing tips. And then fish will see that they get oh I probably can eat that. And they grab the fish and then eat them. So the glowing actually helps them in attracting prey.
It's like a rave. Yeah. Jelly rave. Cool. Yeah, I would think that maybe it was the opposite. Like it's glowing in the ocean and an animal that preys on that specific type of jelly sees it and is like, oh, yeah, I can see it in the dark.
So evolutionarily, that wouldn't make sense.
Okay, cool.
Josh is like, No, I have a question. I have heard that. Some people say, Oh, well, the oldest animal ever. Is this immortal jelly? And there's some jelly apparently that lives forever. Can you tell us what the deal is with the deal?
Yeah, I can tell you what the deal is with the deal. So So yeah, that is that is a true story. So there is a species of jellies, which is we call the immortal jellies. Turritopsis before you ask, that's genus. I don't remember the species name though so yeah, so what's kind of fun with that jelly, it's like a little jelly. It's, it's a Hydrozoan species. But other about the size of a quarter. Max is probably nickel actually are actually. And so what it'll do is, so it'll get to the Medusa stage, which should be the end of its lifecycle, and instead of dying, if it causes stress, it'll revert back to its polyp stage. So it'll, it'll find a place to settle and it'll settle again. And then when conditions are optimum again, it'll produce the Medusa once more so in theory can run back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between those two stages and essentially just regenerate and live forever.
Is it cloning in the polyp stage, so also creates more of them?
No? From my understanding,
that's interesting. It's beautiful.
Well, you can edit that part out right.
I kind of like that there are some things we just don't even know yet. You know, like, there are so many jellies out there, how many species of jellies are there?
so so no one really knows how many exact species of jellies there are. It's estimated that I think it was 15,000 give or take a zero at the end. But because jellies inhabit just about every ecosystem, you're always finding brand new jellies, there's specimens of jellies that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has attained, that are found so deep that if they're exposed to oxygen in the water, it kills them. Wow. So so they have to make sure that they strip all oxygen from the water.
Adapted to live wherever
Oh, good an easy question. So So tentacle length and oral arm length is really dependent on what they're eating. So with like ag jellies, that they consume other jellies, they don't necessarily have to have really long training trailing tentacles. And so what they need to do is have a lot of short tentacles so they can really engulf their prey. Other species like are bald on my brain is thinking that sea nettles which were would be eating a lot of arthropods, as well as as other jellies. They can have longer tentacles to to help capture plankton that are just drifting. So it's really about what they eat. Like I said, box jellies, they can have relatively long tentacles but like, you know, in regards to how big their bell is, but it's not that long, and it's because you know, they're needing to take Capture larger prey, so they need to immobilize it so they don't need a long tentacle for that. So it's it's all about feeding.
What they're eating is how determines the length of their arms.
When you come to the aquarium you can touch moon jellies. And we see them outside in our in harbor terrace. They have so many stomachs sometimes. What is the purpose of a jelly having more than one?
What a great time for me to correct you. But I get this question a lot, and I get I get how it's misunderstood, misinterpreted or misunderstood. So the horseshoe shaped things on the animal is actually its gonads. And so actually, they have so many gonads Yeah. But so what there's so those gonads that I can actually tell the gender of the animals by the color of them. So Medusa are male and female. So they do have specific genders. But yeah, so. So those actually lay inside a central stomach. So the whole cavity is their stomach. But it but yeah, so so they will have so in theory. So what makes a jelly jelly is it has bilateral symmetry, meaning if you split in half, it's identical on each side. But you get these weird genetic mutations where they'll have extra gonads. And it's not hurting or harming the animal in any way. It's just kind of cool looking. But yeah, it does happen on the moon jelly types, but like a moon jelly is supposed to have four gonads. But yeah, like I said, it's a genetic mutation and can cause it.
anything that you want to share about jellies that we haven't touched on?
Um, no. I mean, I could go on and on about how cool jellies or I mean, I've been doing it. It's like I said, 12 years, it's clearly interest and passion of mine, because it's totally fun. But, uh, but yeah, that's all the questions you guys have. It is
It is all the questions we have. If you have time, I just want to talk a little bit about sustainability. And aquaculture is a huge portion of what Josh is doing here. And sustainability. And aquaculture just means that we are trying to culture a lot of our own animals here. So that that mitigates some of the collecting from the ocean that we might typically do. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Jelly populations are not really being impacted by collecting. But at the same time, being able to culture animals in house is really cool. And that's a very specialized skill set. If any of our listeners have jellies, I'm sure you know how difficult they can be to care for I know that there are people who are pretty experienced hobbyists who have kept tanks and kept you know animals for their whole lives and cannot keep jellies alive. So it is a skill set that we're very lucky to have here. And I think it's really cool to see the entire industry moving in the direction of more sustainability and being able to, you know, breed animals in house and have these animals here, rather than going out and collecting them. Although we do learn a lot about different species when we bring in new ones here. So yeah, thanks, Josh for doing all of that and for being our jelly Josh that we have here on site and for your jelly sting immunity powers that you maybe have will fall in the hands. In a future episode, we'll follow up on how immune you are. And we can talk more about it next
next season. Well thank you so much Josh.
season. But well thank you so much Josh. Aquarium of the Podcific is brought to you by Aquarium of the Pacific a 501 C three nonprofit organization in 2023. The aquarium celebrates 25 years of connecting millions of people worldwide to the beauty and wonder of our ocean planet. Head to aquarium of pacific.org to learn more about our 25th anniversary celebration. Keep up with the aquarium on social media at aquarium Pacific on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
This podcast is produced by Erin Lundy, Madeline Walden and Scott Shaw. Our music is by Andrew Reitsma and our podcast art is by Brandi Kenney, special thanks to Cecile Fisher and Anitza Valles and our audio visual and education departments, and to all of our amazing podcast guests for taking time out of their day to talk about the important work that they do. Podcific wouldn't be possible without the support of the aquarium stoners, members, guests and supporters. Thanks for listening