Meet the Cephea cephea: a jelly so nice they named it twice. This ocean dweller is sometimes called the cauliflower jellyfish because of its resemblance to the vegetable. It can reach over 20 in (51 cm) in diameter! Jellies have bodies that include two transparent layers: an outer one for protection and an inner one for digesting food. Between the two layers, you’ll find a watery gel—in fact, their bodies are more than 95 percent water!
Photo: Derek Keats, CC BY 2.0, flickr
What has no heart and no brain? No, it’s not your ex… it’s the barrel jellyfish (Rhizostoma pulmo). Also known as the dustbin-lid jellyfish (yes, really), this species can reach an impressive 35 in (90 cm) in diameter and can weigh up to 77 lbs (35 kg)! Like other jellies, this critter relies on its nervous system to function.
Photo: tato grasso, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Jelly-ve it or not, the lion’s mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata) is one of the world’s longest animals. This jumbo-sized jelly trails a “mane” of more than 800 stinging tentacles that are covered in cells with venom that stun prey, including other jellyfish, small crustaceans, and zooplankton. Just how long is the lion’s mane jellyfish? Well, its tentacles can grow more than 100 feet (30 meters) long! In fact, the longest examples of this species—which inhabit the Arctic Ocean—are even longer than the longest known blue whale. Come see a life-size model of one at the Museum’s Hall of Biodiversity!
Photo: R. Mickens/ © AMNH
🍳May we interest you in some egg-yolk jelly (Phacellophora camtschatica) facts to go with your breakfast? 🌊This critter can be found drifting in coastal waters around the world. It feeds on other jellyfish that get caught in its long tentacles, which can grow up to 20 feet (6 meters) long! It has a relatively mild sting, so crustaceans hitchhike on or inside the jelly’s bell—some fish even swim among its tentacles. Photo: John Rusk, CC BY 2.0, flickr #AnimalFacts #jellyfish #OceanLife #EggYolkJelly #jelly #nature #dyk https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqAH5Nr58R/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
In honor of World Jellyfish Day, we bring you the Cephea cephea, a jelly so nice they named it twice. This ocean dweller can reach over 20 inches in diameter and is sometimes called the Cauliflower Jellyfish because of its resemblance to the vegetable thanks to its eight brownish, mouth-arms. (It’s also been dubbed the Crown Jellyfish—which can be confusing, since that name is also used for other species.) Jellies have bodies that are made of two transparent layers: an outer one for protection and an inner one for digesting food. Between the two layers, you’ll find nothing but a watery gel—in fact, their bodies are more than 95% water!
Photo: Derek Keats
The Crossota jellyfish pictured below was described by Scientific American as so surreal it "almost looks photoshopped." Discovered last year in the famed Mariana Trench, 2.3 miles beneath the surface, the animal has separate sets of long and short tentacles, and a motionless bell most likely used to ambush its prey. The striking red and yellow coloring are actually radial canals and gonads.
See more magical creatures like this inside our immersive Jelly Dome-- part of the Milstein Science Series-- before it closes on June 30th: https://goo.gl/XniS3j. Photo from video by NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. Watch the footage: https://goo.gl/xnEKf2
Starting this week, the Museum lets you explore the underwater world of some of the ocean’s most beautiful and bizarre animals: jellies. Come dive into the lives of jellies in an immersive video experience in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.*
But what exactly is a jelly? It's is a general term for any kind of transparent, gelatinous (or jellylike) animal that floats in the ocean. Jellies belong to two different groups, cnidarians and ctenophores, and while members of the two groups may sometimes look alike, they are not all closely related.
Hundreds of jelly species live in oceans around the world, from shallow bays to the deep sea. Some even live in fresh water. The most common jellies are true jellyfish (cnidarians) and comb jellies (ctenophores).
Most jellyfish have long stinging tentacles and have oral-arms that help catch and eat food. Comb jellies have oval bodies lined with rows of fluttering cilia. Instead of stinging, they use their tentacles to pull prey into their large mouths.
Whether they’re cnidarians or ctenophores, jellies have bodies that are made of two transparent layers—an outer one for protection and an inner one for digesting food. Between the two layers, you’ll find nothing but a watery gel—in fact, their bodies are more than 95% water! Aside from these few parts, there’s not much more to them. These amazing animals get along with no bones, no head, no legs—not even a brain!
Experience the world of jellies, open now through May 26, 2017. Part of the Milstein Science Series.
The Portuguese man o’ war delivers a powerful sting to its prey—and sometimes to people—through venom-filled structures on its tentacles. It is not a jellyfish, but rather a colony of different types of zooids (small animals). Jean Louis Coutant engraved the plate for this illustration.
Among the most venomous of marine animals, cubozoans (box jellies and sea wasps) are agile swimmers, capable of actively preying on zooplankton and small fishes, which they immobilize with their potent venom. This illustration comes from René Primevère Lesson's Voyage autour du monde, 1838. See this and other sea creatures in Opulent Oceans: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History, an exhibition which includes 46 exquisite reproductions from 33 rare and beautifully illustrated scientific works, now on view.
It’s one thing to survive in harsh environments, but quite another to hit the reset button when faced with an imminent threat. Only one animal is known to have this remarkable ability: a small species of jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, first discovered in the 1880s in the Mediterranean Sea and highlighted as a uniquely enduring organism in the exhibition Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species.
Like all jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii begins life as a larva, called a planula, which develops from a fertilized egg. A planula swims at first, then settles on the sea floor and grows into a cylindrical colony of polyps. These ultimately spawn free-swimming, genetically identical medusae—the animals we recognize as jellyfish—which grow to adulthood in a matter of weeks.
Fully grown, Turritopsis dohrnii is only about 4.5 mm (0.18 inches) across, smaller than a pinky nail. A bright-red stomach is visible in the middle of its transparent bell, and the edges are lined with up to 90 white tentacles. These tiny, transparent creatures have an extraordinary survival skill, though. In response to physical damage or even starvation, they take a leap back in their development process, transforming back into a polyp. In a process that looks remarkably like immortality, the born-again polyp colony eventually buds and releases medusae that are genetically identical to the injured adult. In fact, since this phenomenon was first observed in the 1990s, the species has come to be called “the immortal jellyfish.”
Image: © Takashi Murai/The New York Times Syndicate/Redux
The crystal jelly, Aequorea victoria, swims near the surface of the Pacific Ocean. When this jelly is touched, green light flashes from its rim. Scientists have learned to make use of the unusual molecule that produces its light, as well as a fluorescent molecule that turns the light green.
See the glowing models in Creatures of Light.
An exhibition preparator works on jellyfish models for the upcoming exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence, which opens March 31.
Photo by Rod
