![]() |
Credit: NSF / Henry Kaiser |
If you needed a perfect ocean villain, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more difficult to track and capture than the jellyfish. The most well-known types are essentially bags of water with stinging tentacles. They eat constantly, they reproduce in overwhelming blooms that choke the seas, they turn a morning swim into a painful, goopy experience, and they don’t seem to contribute much to the balance of ocean life.To read the whole article, click on "Terrors or Treasures?" Bonus fun fact: a group of jellyfish is called a smack.
At least, that’s how researchers used to view them.
You see, the problem with studying an organism with the consistency of slime is catching it and tracking it. With fish, you can just drop a net in the water and scoop them up. You can tag sharks and track where they roam. Larger, boney animals show up in the stomachs of other marine life, if you care to look (and lots of scientists do).
Looking for a comment area?
You can start your own conversation by using the buttons below!