The Winged Jellyfish
Image: The original Winged Jellyfish specimen, along with a beautiful edition of this short story, being carefully packed for return to the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida.
Did you know that moon jellyfish don’t actually swim? That’s not entirely true, but they are not strong swimmers, so they tend to drift wherever the ocean currents carry them. If you have ever seen a moon jellyfish exhibit at a sea aquarium, you may have noticed that they were presented in a round tank. This tank is round so the moon jellies don’t get stuck in a corner. A pump circulates the water in a way that keeps their delicate masses moving in gentle circles, mimicking the ocean currents.
The salinity of the water is crucial. The jellyfish require a precise specific gravity between 1.024 and 1.026. Pure water has a specific gravity of 1.000. Salt increases the water’s density and allows the jellyfish to suspend in it. Too little salt, or too much, and they would drag along the ocean floor or just float at the surface like a raft. There’s a simple experiment you can try at home. An egg will sink to the bottom of a glass of fresh water. As you stir in salt, the egg will begin to rise.
The way jellyfish eat is rather unusual. They are carnivores but eat unlike any other carnivore. They sting their prey with their tentacles, and the edible bits are pulled in toward their body. The food is absorbed through their skin and then moved through eight channels into four stomachs.
I once had a jellyfish tank of my own, so I know how difficult it can be to manage their many needs. I had a round tank, and I maintained the proper salinity, which was a constant challenge. I fed them brine shrimp with a turkey baster every day, squirting the food directly onto the region of their stomachs. By doing it that way, most of it was absorbed and there was very little waste to settle at the bottom of the tank, which would have required even more frequent cleanings and water changes.
I haven’t had jellyfish in a long time, but my interest in them was recently revitalized. Because there is a new species: an amazing creature called the winged jellyfish.
A large lagoon had formed after a breach occurred in a series of ocean dunes along a coast not far from here. Schools of common moon jellyfish were pushed into the lagoon when the breach diverted immeasurable volumes of ocean water into it. The brackish water of the lagoon disrupted the jellyfish’s buoyancy… but they quickly adapted to do something incredible.
By somehow building up a little more strength than they had before, they start to propel themselves up and out of the water. We are able to detect these events happening from a distance as a low frequency sound signature of 41.2 Hz. The rhythm really picks up when many of them are doing it in succession. And this is when the real wonder begins.
For reasons we don’t yet fully understand, it triggers a dramatic transformation. Their tentacles begin to fuse and elongate, forming wing-like structures. From what little we have been able to study, it appears that this process happens almost instantaneously. It’s a metamorphosis akin to caterpillars becoming butterflies, though far quicker and more surreal.
We don’t think that these jellies are at all rare. They are presumed to be quite common, just hardly ever seen in the wild. Their newly formed wings allow them to fully eject themselves from the lagoon, but that’s pretty much all. The wings are underneath them, where their tentacles once were, so they can go in only one direction. Up.
So winged jellyfish don’t actually fly. That’s not entirely true, but they are not strong fliers, so they tend to drift wherever the air currents carry them. In a matter of minutes, however, they begin to starve. There’s no jellyfish food floating around in the sky for them to absorb. Their wings flap slower and slower. And before they have even stopped moving, the winged jellyfish has died.
But they do not fall to the ground, as you might expect. Their final act, it is now known, is a spectacular twirl into a thermal updraft born of their own heat as they break apart into a billion pieces of the finest dust.
Some say this dust preserves their transformative magic and that it accumulates in the clouds. They say if it falls with the rain, anyone who touches it gains that little bit of strength needed to push them toward a major metamorphosis of their own.
In fact, the direction of today’s winds could have brought countless numbers of winged jellyfish to the skies just above where we are right now.
And it looks like rain.
The story continues…
View Adam Oehler’s painting, That Winged Jellyfish, inspired by this story.