January 11, 2020 • 52 mins
Jellyfish are among the most adaptable, competitive organisms on the planet. They can grow back into their juvenile stage when resources are scarce, reproduce in massive groups and kill an adult human, among lots of other neat stuff. Learn all about em in this classic episode!
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, everyone, It's October sixt What No, but this is
Chuck from the future past telling you to listen to
the selects pick for the week Jellyfish colon even cooler
than the OCTOPI you decide. Welcome to Stuff You should Know,
(00:22):
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant with Jerry st You should know. Oh man,
let's start over all right, Well, that's okay. How you doing.
(00:46):
I'm good. I'm jet black still, I'm coming out of
it for sure, but yeah, I'm a little jetlike. I
just was explaining off Mike that my body is at
four thirty or five every morning. Does get up, dummy?
It's ten fifteen eleven, And I go, no, it's not.
It's dark. No internal struggle. And it's a British voice too.
(01:12):
It's like, get up, you need your beans and blood,
sausage and import pies. How was that? Oh man, I
want another one so bad, you know? Save that? Okay? Uh?
My jet leg is not so much pronounced in the morning,
it's just at nine thirty at night. I fall over
wherever I'm standing or said, you're just like cooking in
(01:34):
a walk and you just fall face for it. First
you noticed the burned face. Yeah, that's dangerous. Well it
hurt pretty bad because that walk grease gets pretty hot,
it does walk. What is this? What walks? Who walks? Still? Dude?
You kidney? No dark continents of people watch? Oh well sure,
(01:56):
but I just I guess I just imagined like wearing
a tennis or tied around my back. And I didn't
say fond should you're having a fond part of boiling cheese.
That's pretty seventies. You know what, if you ever want
a fond dupot and like because you think it'd be
(02:16):
fun to have a fond party, don't buy one new.
Just go to a goodwill. I went for like three dollars. Yeah,
you mean I have an unused one? Is it pea green?
I don't know if I would cook out of a
pea green anything? No? Yeah, all right, no, I wouldn't
pe green refrigerator. I wouldn't need out of it p
(02:40):
green car. I just throw up any time I want
to go drop uh, I'll tell you what I am
excited about though. Yeah, this is now officially my second
favorite seafaring creature after octopus, Yeah for sure. Yeah, and
this was close to like the jellyfish was really tugging
(03:02):
at my heartstrings. Yeah, and the and the octopus just
kept saying, you know what, remember me, remember the gramatophores.
Watch this bam. It looks at like something completely different.
And then I remember it. I was like, all right, octopus,
you're right, jellyfish can't do that. I'm Rocky the squirrel. Now,
I'm a romance soldier, I'm a cornucopia of vegetables in
(03:24):
an oil painting. Uh. They are pretty cool. Yeah, but
the jellyfish is really amazing. Yeah. The octopus is though
they're like they're doing it on purpose. The jellyfish just
accidentally kind of stumbles backwards into awesomeness. You know, well
after five million years of practice, maybe seven, Yeah, we'll see.
(03:46):
It's amazing. So when you're talking about jellyfish, a lot
of people say, well, there's a jellyfish, that's a jellyfish,
that's a jellyfish. That lady walking down the street with
the leash got a jellyfish on the end of right,
and and you would say jellyfish, jellyfish, comb, jelly dog,
or weird cat lady who walks her cat. Yeah, that's unwholesome.
(04:07):
That's as unwholesome as walking a jellyfish down this street
on a leash. So there are such things as comb jellies,
and there's jellyfish, and you out there who's lived maybe
ten twenty years on this planet or more, we've probably
seen them both. But it turns out that they look
very similar. But as we're finding out, as we get
(04:28):
deeper and deeper into using genetics to do taxonomy rather
than our peepers, that doesn't necessarily mean they're related. And
actually there's there's some tremendous debate between just how closely
related jellyfish and comb jellies are. Tremendous debate. Yes, we're
very subdued. It depends on where you are among like
fifty people. If you're in the jellyfish department of some
(04:51):
like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I'll bet it gets nuts
a little vigorous. Yeah, they down some some old English
forty uh right, malt liquor and argue and to get
out the brass knuckles about taxonomy. Uh so that the
two phila they are different. Uh, we're talking respectively for
jellyfish and comb jellies. Uh, nadaria and ton afera. Yeah, nice,
(05:17):
and there's seas before. Both of them are both silent,
so it looks like centa bites and sephora. Yeah. Cento bytes. Yeah,
what is that a centerbon? That's no center bites. They
were the monsters in hell Raiser. Oh I thought it
was like a centabon that was in handy bite sized pieces.
(05:39):
That's a cinabyte. These are cento bites. Gotcha? Where where
did this research come from? By the way, a big
shout out Smithsonian. They have a site called the Ocean
Portal amazing that has all sorts of great stuff on it. Yeah,
you can't go wrong with Smithsonian. That's their their logo.
There's there's this that forms the basis of this one.
(05:59):
But I also want to give a huge shout out
to another article I read a while back that I
went back and reread. Actually it's called They're taking Over
and it was a New York View Books article on it. Yeah. Uh,
well reviewed a book on jellyfish, Yes, specifically jellyfish blooms
or when you'll see on the news like, oh my gosh,
there's five thousand jellyfish right here, right now, or thirty
(06:23):
three thousand square miles of jellyfish. But we'll get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
were getting ahead of ourselves. So there's jellyfish and comb
jellies and there we don't know if they're related. They
look a lot like they're very much. Um, they seem related,
So we're gonna talk about both. Yes, right, so let's
talk about him, Chuck. All right, Well we'll start off
with the body, uh, because well they're kind of all body. Uh.
(06:46):
They both jellyfish income jellies have they have a lot
of differences, but you know, when you look under the hood,
they have a lot of similarities, which is why you
would expect when people use their peepers they would just think, well, yeah,
of course you have the same look at them. Yeah,
don't don't think too don't overthink it. That was early science.
Don't overthink it. So both of them have a couple
(07:08):
of major cell layers, the external epidermis and then the
internal one called the gastrodermist. And in between those is
what you think of as jellyfish. Yeah, that's the mesoglia, yeah,
which is a great name for that, and it's the filling. Yeah,
it's it's nine. And in fact, jellyfish and come jellies
(07:30):
are about water. Yeah, seawater actually salt and water. They're
basically made up of the sea. I saw it put somewhere. Yeah,
you know, it's amazing. Um. So they have basically one
mouth where um stuff goes in and comes out. It's
like a U mouth and oral anis basically I don't
(07:55):
even know if they refer to it as a mouth.
Do they like somewhere in this thing? Didn't they called
it literally like a body hole or something. Yeah, it's
it's a pretty basic, basic organism, but it does a
lot of things. Yeah, so it's not Yeah, when you
think of mouth, you just think eating. Not necessarily, Hey,
let's put some sperm and egg in there too. It's
like all purpose. Yeah, but they don't necessarily need in
(08:18):
a mouth for eating because apparently they can absorb nutrients
like just through their skin. Yeah, so they have they
don't have a stomach, they don't have intestines, they don't
have lungs. They're just like, get in my get in
my skin nutrients yeah, and oxygen, And if you think
about it, then they don't need lungs. They don't need
like a they don't need a mouth, so they don't
(08:41):
need to chew. All this stuff requires a lot of energy.
They actually are extraordinarily efficient organisms, so they get a
lot more energy out of the stuff that they take
in than other things, which actually gives them a huge
advantages we'll see later. Uh. So the outer cells, they
have this epidermis, like we said, and it has what's
(09:03):
called a nerve net, and it's just this net of
nerves literally, um, and that it's it's it's their nervous
system basically, and it's the it's the most basic, Um,
I guess, brain like structure of any organism on the planet,
of any multicellular organism. I guess that's right. And so
(09:23):
in the nerve net, not only does it have nerves,
it also has some sort of specialized cells, like some
that detect light so they can know that they need
to move away from that boat spotlight. Uh, and then
some that tell them whether they're moving up or down
or whether they're upside down. Yeah, big dummies, that's a
that's a big one. You think about it. But I mean,
(09:46):
like that's if you don't have eyeballs. No, But this
is the weird part. Man, this is so disturbing to me.
This is almost as disturbing as squid having beaks. Some
types of jellies, box jellies, in particular um box jellyfish
have eyes. They have retinas lenses, but they don't have
(10:08):
a brain. So scientists are like, how what how are
you processing these images that you're clearly taking in and
responding to, Like, we've shown you pictures of like um
Sheryl lad and you like gave a thumbs up. So
obviously you can use these eyes, but how are you
(10:28):
sorting these images? You know? Yeah, they think it's that
that nerve ring, but they're not sure, right, and that's
a ring around Uh, it's concentration of nerves basically that
they haven't figured out yet. But they think that's there
in is the secret. It would be like, um, it
(10:48):
would be like now, I can't come with a good analogy.
There's a million of them out there, but I'm not
still jet Like I guess I just want to apologize
to everybody because that could have been I was on
the edge of my seat. Uh. Uh. So comb jellies
they have a few things that the regular jelly does
not have. Uh. Most notably the comb their name for
(11:11):
these uh silia, these giant fuse cilia. There's eight rows
up and down their bodies and they basically are their
ways of locomotive neck like little bitty oars paddling around
in the water. And there are other animals that do this,
but the comb jelly is the largest one to do
this and to use this kind of locomotion. And it
(11:32):
looks like a rainbow if you look one up, but
you think it might be bioluminescent, but it's not. It's
just light catching the cilia and scattering it. It's beautiful,
It is quite beautiful. But that's the thing that that
separates comb jellies from jelly jellyfish most um pronounced lee right, Yeah,
because a lot of their activities and just the stuff
(11:56):
that they do, it's fairly similar the TV they watch,
but their means of locomotion are are really the big,
huge distinction. Yeah. The A lot of the comb jellies
have a single pair just two tentacles, but it looks
like more because they branch out um and they use
those like little fishing lines because they have sticky cells
uh color blast at the end. And this is different
(12:18):
uh big time than jellyfish. They don't sting. No, they
use um gluey, which is pretty neat, so you won't
be stung by a comb jelly. So just swim up
and hug one. They love it when you do that. So. Um,
when you think of a jellyfish, like a true jelly
is what what they're called. Um there you think of
(12:40):
like kind of this bell shaped umbrella shaped thing with
the tentacles hanging down. Beautiful. And if it's a jellyfish,
that's actually one of two forms that it will take
in its lifetime. Right, Um, it's that's the medusa form,
and it's it's the adult form. There's a juvenile form
called the all up and um. Depending on when it
(13:03):
is in its life cycle, it will either be in
a medusa form a polyp form. Yeah, and we'll get
into the little more of the life cycle. But a
polyp can end up becoming a medusa or just might
be happy as little polyp and to stay as a
poly up and create more meducea. Yeah, and the polyp
looks like um, it almost looks like a plant. It
(13:23):
looks like a little stalk attached to something, usually the
sand or as we'll see, maybe a oil rig out
in the middle of the ocean or something, or share
a lad. That's right, because she's she's a deep water
dweller at this point. Um. So it looks like a
little plant. It's got it looks like a little stalk,
(13:43):
and then the uh, tentacles are blooming out of it,
almost like a flower. Yeah, like anemone or something like that. Yeah.
And sometimes you see him many many of them together
in a colony. You think that's an amazing plant. It's
actually a jelly. Yeah, pretty cool if you would be
able to tell if you poked it with your finger.
That's right. So the size among jellies ants and um
(14:06):
comb jellies are I mean, some of are just microscopic,
others get pretty big. If there's one called the lion's
main jellyfish, which on the whole across like the whole species,
they are the largest jellyfish known to humankind. Did you
see this thing? Yeah, it looks like photoshop when you
see a scuba diver up next to one. It definitely does.
(14:29):
Like the bell actually gets to be six ft wide. Yeah,
And the tentacles are like, um long, fifty ft long,
and some some get bigger than that. But that's you know,
the average size of one of those. This is pretty neat. Yeah,
I mean they're not to be feared. But swimming up
(14:51):
to something that large and that kind of creepy looking
is not for me, that's all. I'll say. That eats anything,
it'll eat anything like people. Yeah, No, I won't need
a person. Yeah, I don't know. If they were big enough,
it might. All right, So let's talk a little bit
about the various types. Um. We'll start with Nadaria, which
(15:14):
is the the jellyfish itself, not the comb. There are
more than ten thousand species, uh, and about four thousand
or fewer actually are what we think of as the
true jelly the medusa that we know and love, uh.
And within that there are quite a few different types,
one of which is the skiff a zoa. And this
(15:37):
is the most common true jellyfish that you can imagine.
When you picture jelly fish in your mind, you're probably
thinking of the skiff a zoa um. The hydrozoa are
um impostors. Well, they're they're the ones who they spend
most of their time as polyps, right, So the skiff
(15:58):
a zoa spend most of their time in the medusas phase.
The hydrozoa are the ones that look like plants at
the bottom and are just reproducing like mad um, and
they actually can come together and create what are called
colonial siphon of force. And that's a you know, a
Portuguese man of war. Okay, So that is actually not
(16:21):
a true jellyfish. It's actually a collection. It's a it's
a colony that comes together to act like one large organism, right,
and it's made up of persons, so like there's the
person that is in charge of digestion, there's the person
that's in charge of catching prey. There's the person that's
in charge of locomotion. And rather than these things being
(16:43):
body parts, they're actually individual organisms that are genetically identical
to one another because they all come from the same egg.
But they're actually a colony. Does that make sense? Like,
imagine if your organs were various actual organisms that came
together to make you. It's like the polyphonic spree of
(17:04):
the ocean world. Exactly. It's amazing. That's exactly what I
was driving at. Uh. Next up we have the Cuba
zoa and that's you mentioned the box jellyfish. They look
like a box is more squared looking. Those are the
most dangerous ones. Yeah. They have the most potent venom
and it is stuff not just of jellyfish, of any
animal on the planet. Yeah, the sea wasp has the
(17:26):
most powerful venom for humans, I should say the sea wasp.
And that just awesome sounding. Yeah, it sounds like something
you want to avoid at all costs. Yeah. Uh so
these guys are the ones that have a more complex
nervous system, that have the the eyes right, Yeah, with
(17:46):
the corneas and things. So they're the most deadly and
they're looking at you. Yeah, they're saying, I'm coming for you.
The star o zoa stalk jellyfishes, and they don't float.
They are actually like to cling onto things and attached
to things, and they are mainly cold water. But all
you can find most all kinds are not all kinds.
(18:08):
You can find some kind of jellyfish and almost any
kind of water, any kind of ocean water in the world. Well,
not just that there's some thrive and freshwater. There's a
type of jellyfish that is um all over the Great Lakes.
It was originally it's native to China, and they think
that it was brought over originally from China to England
(18:29):
in like a water lily shipment, because it was first
discovered in the West in like garden ponds, and it
somehow made its way to the Great Lakes. And now
there's a freshwater jellyfish that's about I think the size
of your thumbnail, depending on what size your thumbnail is
in the Great Lakes. That's a jellyfish. And it's a
(18:49):
true jellyfish. And we should say also with um jellyfish locomotion,
they don't use the silly a like a comb jellyfish
does They in Medusa form x banned and contract the
bell right, so beautiful. And I was reading I think
it was a Scientific American or Popular Science, one of
those two all posted on the podcast Pitch, but it
(19:10):
was they some researchers examined how jellyfish move and they
found that not only are they like um able to
move when they when they expand and then contract in
the resting motion of their bell, of vortex actually forms
in the water above them and moves beneath them and
(19:31):
moves them up that way. So they're constantly moving, but
they're only exerting like half of the energy needed to
move forward. To propel forward or upward. Right, So that's
even one more way that they're incredibly efficient type of animal. Yeah,
without a brain, they're pretty smart, you know what I mean. Uh,
should we take a break? Yeah, all right, we'll take
(19:51):
a break, and we're gonna come back and dive into
the wonderful world of comb jellies. All right. So we
(20:21):
talked about just a few of the standard jellyfish. The
comb jellies are way way fewer species of the tina fours. Um,
we're talking I think ten thousand for the other this
is about a hundred fifty. Yeah, not even hundred fifty. Yeah,
But they're saying that it's possible that these are just
(20:43):
the ones we are aware of because um, we've encountered
them in coastal waters, that they may be way more
in deep sea. Yeah, they don't know much about those guys, right, right.
And the ones that are in deep see that we've
encountered tend to be so fragile that we can't collect them. Yeah,
because they're not tough, because they don't to put up
with the you know, their merrids and waves and yeah,
they just float out there and yeah, you look at
(21:05):
them too hard. And they crumble. Um. So one type
of a comb jelly is uh sodipid uh and they
are all around their spherical or oval. They have those
branch tentacles that we talked about. Those tentacles are a
little unique and that they can actually draw them back
into the body when it's cold, yeah, which is pretty cool.
Really okay, so I believe uh yeah. And they have
(21:29):
like sheets on the sides of their mouths that it
draws back into which is pretty cool amazing. Um. Then
there's low baits uh, which have lobes on the sides,
right yeah, um, and that's about it. They have the
lobes and that's what they're known for baroids. These are
(21:49):
kind of cool. These are the dudes that have no tentacles.
So the way they eat is they have a big,
big mouth that draws in a lot of stuff and
then a very tight, almost zipper like thing that shuts
and then they can shut that mouth really hard and
just mush all that stuff up. Well. They they have
silia inside their mouths that act like teeds that pull
(22:12):
their prey apart alive teeth tooth teeth. Yeah, oh man,
it's weird. Jet leg um. But the little the teeth
just pick it like their prey and just pull them apart.
It dissolves them, basically mechanically amazing. Have you ever seen
a video of um, the uh, the pelican who's just
(22:33):
standing there and there's a pigeon like on the ground
right in front of him, and all of a sudden
the pigeon the pelican just eats the pigeon, and the
pigeons like trying to get out of the pelicans like
huge mouth, and the pelicans just sitting there like nothing's happening.
And then finally like the pigeon stops moving. It is
really disturbing because you you you know, like pelicans don't
(22:54):
normally eat live pigeons, so there's like there's something wrong
with this pelican or it was just then steely reserve,
like no remorse whatsoever. Yeah, it's a it's a disconcerting video,
especially if you're a pigeon lover, which I'm not. I'm
it sound like I hate pigeons, but you don't want
to see him get you know, eaten eaten by a pelican. Yeah,
(23:16):
it's it's weird. It's totally strange. Where do you find
this stuff? It's around so weird. I think you may
showed me that one. Yeah. You guys always have a
lot of weird videos at your fingertips. You and you
we were just always talking about, like did you see
the one where you know, the pelican ate the pigeon. Yeah,
I guess so that's pretty neat. Um Comb jellies distribution wise,
(23:40):
they are also all over the oceans. Uh. They do
perform a little warmer water though, but you can't find
them anywhere, right. Um. So we're talking earlier about the
fact that they are from different phyla and that there's this,
you know, drunken argument going on among scientists at the
Monterey Bay aquari about how how closely related they are. Um.
(24:02):
They used to all be described as uh sellin slinarata,
which is hollow bellied. Oh yeah, makes sense, But they don't.
They don't say that anymore. And if you want to
be ridiculed by your peers, call them that. But some
people say, you know, their sister groups. Some people say, nope,
they're not even that closely related. Uh So the debate
(24:25):
rages on. I guess yep. So, Um, what what's interesting
is that we even know how long jellies have been
around because there they have no solid parts. Yeah, you'd
think it'd be hard to find a fossil. They have
gelatinous parts, they don't have any hardened parts. Yeah, that
would be fossilized easily. But there have been some discoveries,
(24:45):
some amazing discoveries of jellyfish and um comb jellies from
about five million years ago. It's the I believe, the
oldest known specimens found. And there's this one found in
Utah because apparently Utah used to be a shallow inland
sea and it had these jellyfish in it. And I
guess something happened to this jellyfish. It was crushed by
(25:07):
a rock, something a lot of pressure, I would think,
but all of a sudden it just captured it. Because
it's it's like a perfect it's like a drawing of
the jellyfish in a rock. Um And it's the oldest
fossil and it's five million years old. So it was
a pretty lucky find actually to find this, this jellyfish
(25:28):
that should not have been fossilized, that was fossilized. So
we do know that there um about two hundred or
a hundred and fifty million years older than fish fish
weren't even around by then. Um, and they think that
possibly sea comb or jelly comb or sorry, comb jellies
were Um, it's possible they were the earliest animals to
(25:50):
branch off, even more even earlier than sponges. Well, didn't
they find that the jellyfish was the first animal in
the sea that didn't just float along like a dummy,
that actually used muscles to swim places. Yeah, and it
was possible it was the comb jellies that did that.
So it's possible that comb jellies branched off from the
(26:10):
tree of life, so it's just one type of animal.
Then all of a sudden, there's a comb jelly. Right,
what is this black magic you speak of? Right? And
then maybe the jellyfish at some later point branched off
of the comb jelly right. Um, But either way, it
would have been the comb jelly and or the jellyfish
that were the first to say we're going this way. Yeah,
(26:31):
you guys are just floating around like a bunch of
morons waiting for food to hit You were embarrassed for you. Well,
speaking of food, they are all carnivorous and they eat,
like you said, they'll eat anything. They love plankton, but
they eat fish. They eat crustaceans. Some eat other jellyfish,
which is disgusting. Um, and those uh neumaticist and color blasts,
(26:56):
the stingers or the glue guns. Um, they are good
for defense. But uh, there are a hundred and fifty
animals that also eat the jellies. Fish and sea turtles.
There's the sunfish loves them. Weather back seat turtles love them.
They they journey to find them. Yeah, that's how much
they love them. The Chinese, Yeah, they eat human beings
(27:20):
eat jellyfish. Yeah. It's apparently a wedding delicacy in China
and has been for about fifteen sixteen hundred years. Yeah,
ours is catered salmon in uh chicken Marbella. Uh yeah,
fo thousand tons of jellyfish are caught each year in
fifteen countries, mainly in Southeast Asia's where they're eating these. Yeah,
(27:43):
but um, I read that Georgia, our state of Georgia,
um has a commercial jellyfish fishery. Really big Gem's jellies
preserved Moonshina. You totally eat jellyfish? Would sure I would
try it? Yeah, apparently it's also um it's served in Japan. Too,
it's salted, which would be good. I would try raw.
(28:07):
I would try raw jellyfish and sushi or something like that,
but I would guess that salted strips and jellyfish are
probably vastly preferable. I'm not nearly as adventurous as you
with my my mouth and my stomach, but I might
try jellyfish, even though I'm talking about how much I
love it. Right, you just cry while you ate? Yeah, exactly.
(28:34):
You were so beautiful once. Um. Well, I would eat
um wooly mammoth. Oh yeah, and you like them? Yeah? Uh,
you gotta bring floss? Would you eat woly mammoth? Supposedly
that does nothing? Have you heard about that? Oh? Yeah?
Then the new studies its flossing is no good. Well,
we talked about that. I think what they said. It
(28:56):
depends on who you talk to. Some people are saying like, no,
they just realize that no one's ever done a scientific
study to back up that flossing is good for you.
And other people are saying like, no, they did some
studies and found that it doesn't do anything, which I
cannot believe. We either just talked about this the last
recording session, or we talked about it on stage. We
(29:16):
probably talked about it on stage because it came out
while we were in the UK. Okay, yeah, all right,
but the idea that getting rotting food out from between
your teeth has no positive health benefits for you is
just it defies explanation. It was on stage because I
made a crack about missing my teeth. Oh yeah, I
remember now, uh. Feeding As far as them feeding on
(29:39):
other things, we talked about these tentacles that they have
to capture prey and these nematicists. It's amazing these basically
they're described in the article as venom bearing harpoons. So
what happens is there's a cue. Uh it's either something
has touched them or it's a chemical uh que that
(30:00):
something is around, and they shoot out this little harpoon
and within seven hundred nana seconds it's spears the prey
and releases a toxin. Yes, and it's it's frightening. Yeah.
If you um, if you're a fish, you're in trouble.
If you're another jellyfish, you're in trouble. Something smaller than
(30:22):
that you're just totally dead. And depending on the jellyfish,
if you're a human being, you can die as a
matter of fact too. Yes, we talk about that, dude. Yeah,
so the um there's the sea wasp obviously, which has
the most toxic venom on earth as far as humans
are concerned. But then there's also another type of um
box jellyfish that are much tinier. I think they're about
(30:43):
thumbsized or peanut sized. Yeah, you could. You don't even
see these things, or if you do see them and
they brush against you, you're probably not even gonna feel
the stings called ariicanji, Yeah, which is a an Aboriginal
word for for this type of jellyfish. Right, there's a
dude in the sixties, a Westerner who um was like,
(31:05):
what what is with this jellyfish? I I've heard weird
things about it. I don't know much about it. I'm
gonna go out and let myself get stung by one.
Where did he get killed very easily by something at
any given point Australia, Yeah, exactly, because they're the ones.
They've got the sea wasps too, and they have to
do with the sea wasps. Saying these little guys the
eru kanji. Is that how we agreed we're gonna say it. Yeah,
(31:26):
iri kanji Iri kanji. So this guy survived, but he
um not not well, but he had a hard time
getting to the point where they're like, you're going to survive. Yeah,
he was lucky to survive. So you get a sting
from one of these things, just a single tannicle, apparently
in about twenty to thirty minutes, what's called ira Kanji
(31:47):
syndrome starts to sit in and you feel it in
your lower back first, right, Yeah, and you don't know
you've been stunk. So you're just like, oh, man, like
I tweaked my back out there in the ocean, and
then things really start going south. Then you go and
throw up your right kidney. Yeah. And this article you
said said it feels like someone hits you with a
(32:09):
baseball bat and your kidneys and then comes to nausea
and vomiting, which continues every minute or so for around
twelve hours. Yeah. You get spasms in your arms and legs,
your blood pressure increases, your skin begins to creep. It
says as if worms are burrowing through it. Yeah. Saw
I saw a video of a guy who was stung
and he said it felt like someone was pouring acid
(32:31):
all over my body. Yea from just being brushed by
this thumb sized, tiny little jellyfish. And then there's this
is the creepiest thing to me, says. Victims are often
gripped with a sense of impending doom and begged their
doctors to kill them. Yeah, can you imagine. And they're
spreading their range. Actually they found him off the coast
(32:51):
of Florida. They found him off the coast of South Africa. Jeez. Yeah,
So yeah, they're not to be messed with, alright, So
down with your kanji? Right? Have you ever heard that
you should pee on somebody who's been stung by a jellyfish?
I've seen friends, so that's not true. And they've actually
found that could make it worse. Yeah, but there's actually
(33:12):
some science to it. Right, So if you get if
you get stung by a jellyfish, if it's technacle hits you,
and and you're stung by a nematicist, there may be
some leftover ones still attached to your arm, right, and
you want to get rid of those. But if you
get rid of them, if you pour they just fresh
water on them, you're gonna trigger You're gonna trigger the
(33:36):
little harpoons inside because they're held in place by a
specific concentration of salutes. Right, so if you change that
concentration by hitting it with freshwater, you're gonna set them off.
You seawater because they're held in check in seawater normally.
So you see water to wash it off, and then
you take a credit card and scrape the rest of
(33:57):
them off. But some kind of you know, what if
you if you don't have your credit card on you,
sure if you're not. But supposedly you're supposed to keep
sand out of it, which is tough to do. Sure,
I did the beach. I did it. Don't be dumb
on it. Years back on the what you do in
the chair, all sorts of weird stuff you remember, all right, Well,
(34:19):
getting back to the feeding. Uh, we covered the harpoon.
Themis of the jelly, but the comb jelly like we
talked about earlier that um, this is the neumaticis they
have the glue instead of the venom. So what they
do is they just send out that fishing line and
release that sticky glue and it reels whatever it catches
(34:40):
right on into the mouth. Pretty cool, like something being
sucked towards the death star. Yeah, exact a tractor beam.
You got caught in attractor beam. Basically, should we take
a break. Oh wait, there was one other thing, so
one type of comb jelly. This is so awesome. They
actually eat true jellies, and then they take their nomadicists
(35:02):
and use them for their own hunting. How like? How
so they think they absorbed them and shoot them out
in their teammates save them? Yeah, they took him in
their cheek for later. Can they get an unlimited supply
of these? I don't know. It's curious if you could
see one with like three hundred of them. Look, look
(35:22):
how many I've eaten. It's like, don't be a pig.
Sure you spit some of those out. Uh now, can
we take a break? Yes? All right. By the way,
we just satisfied that one listener because you rejected my break.
Oh yeah, that's true. How about that man a lie?
All right, we'll be back and talk a little bit
about defense. All right, So I promised talk of defense. Um,
(36:09):
these things you've probably seen, jellyfish and comb jellies that
produce light, this bioluminescence. Although when I said earlier, the
comb jelly when it looks colorful, that is not bioluminescence.
They are still bioluminescent, just not in that way right,
so confusing. They actually do produce light. Uh, they have
these proteins that have a chemical reaction to produce this
(36:31):
blue and green light when something might touch it. And yeah,
like moon jellies are well known for this. Yeah, and
they're not exactly sure why, but they think that this
could be a defensive mechanism to like either scare someone
trying to eat you by turning a light on their
face or turning a light on and attracting something larger
to eat that thing. Either way, they think it's defense.
(36:53):
And then alternately, some jellyfish have um camouflage actually not
as good as the US No, no, no, no, not
at all, but I mean obviously some are are most
are transparent. It's pretty good camouflage um. And then some
of the deep sea ones are actually red. They produce
a red pigment and the red apparently is very very
(37:16):
difficult to see in deep water, which is like two
or more where there's no light. Yeah, you think it
would be black, but they say that the red is
easier to produce and exactly, so black would work. It's
just you try making black pigment. You can't and reds
the same down there. Yeah, it's all black. It's all
(37:36):
the same. So um, some of them do that, and
then others have just red pigment in their gut that
if they eat a bioluminescent organism, it's not going to
accidentally attract a predator to come check them out. Interesting. See,
this is really the octopus is threatened in my heart
still a little bit now that I'm talking about this man,
(37:59):
it's unstable. We'll see. I'll give a final vote at
the end. So to me, this is now we get
to the most amazing part, well, one of the most
amazing parts about jelly's sexy. Yeah so, which is not
very sexy, no, although it's like every kind of sex
you can imagine jellyfish engage in, and not just different
(38:21):
species like individuals. Some are hermaphroditic, some are sexually divided,
some are a sexual yep, some yeah, some reproduce a
sexually sometimes in some species like the moon jelly, I
believe they'll all get together in one big mass and
(38:41):
just start swapping sperms and eggs. Yep, spit them out
of that mouth, hoole. There, get some boxed wine. The
parties on put on, Michael Bolton, though your house, your
house keys in a big wooden bowl right now, you
have it. That's the jellyfish way. Uh So the medusa
that that you know and love is the main true
(39:03):
jelly They spawn. So what they do is they release
a bunch of eggs and sperm into the open ocean
a lot of times altogether. And they do this from
their mouth hole and take it in in their mouth hole,
and uh, the sperm meets the egg and that's how
(39:24):
it happens. Yeah, ideally or um in some kinds, the uh,
the eggs stay in the mouth of the female and
the male just shoots sperm out into the water and
the sperm find their way into the mouth. It's a
way to go, yeah, Or they fertilize outside in the water,
like you were saying. Um. And then in others there
(39:49):
they don't even necessarily get together. Yeah, they'll just be
like a pollop will just be sitting there spewing out
sperm or eggs. Gam eats like a all day long
huh one one type spews out like forty through forty
six thousand a day, every day, all the time. Um,
(40:10):
And then the whole idea is that eventually maybe it'll
run into another gam eat and fertilize out. That's the
comb jelly actually, Oh is that a comb that does that? Okay.
The polyps are the ones that are a sexual and
they just bud and divide in half basically to produce
a little identical buddy. And then that can stay a polyp,
(40:30):
or it can eventually become a medusa. Yeah, because that's
the thing, like the polyp is a it's a stage
of a jellyfish, the jellyfish life cycle. It can be
which can be it? Yeah, you can you can just
stay a polyp, or you can eventually become a medusa. Yeah,
And we didn't say that the the Depending on the jellyfish,
(40:51):
it might live for a few weeks or a year.
Apparently they do better in captivity and tend to live
up to several years in captivity. I get the idea.
They're pretty fragile out there in the ocean. Yeah. Um,
but they can reproduce so frequently and so early on
in their life cycle, um that they can populate an
(41:12):
area very quickly to despite having a very short lifespan. Uh.
And then in the polyp stage, some species can stay
there for well, basically almost indefinitely, and just sit there
and reproduce. There's a type of reproduction in the polyp
stage where um, it's called strobe lation, and the little
polyp is sitting there just shooting off these little discs,
(41:36):
ten to fifteen at a time. And they found that
depending on the temperature of the water, um, and the
warmer the water, the more they strobo late um, they'll
there'll be more and more jellyfish that they just kind
of shoot off like this article put it like shooting
off clay pigeons, right, and then each one just transforms
into a medusa. Man, that's amazing. Octopus. Yeah, it's in trouble. Uh.
(42:02):
And then oh, this is super cool. The Tautopsis neutricula.
It is basically immortal. It is a hydrozoan and it
can actually revert back to the poly up stage after
the medusa stage through trans differentiation and live forever essentially
unless it gets killed obviously by something. Uh. And it
(42:25):
is the only animal that anyone knows of that can
do this. Yeah, amazing. There's another type of teratopsis to that. Um.
When it dies, it disintegrates, but it sells some cells
as it's as it's decaying, come back and form another individual. Yea.
(42:46):
So it basically fertilizes itself using its dying body and regenerates.
This is like, yeah, it's tapped into the force. All right.
So we talked earlier about these jellyfish blooms, um or
outbreaks or plagues, worms what else. That's okay, Um, it's
(43:08):
great that these things are proliferating like other species that aren't.
But it can get out of hand. It can interfere
with people. Uh, it can interfere with machinery at power
plants on the coast, cause power outage, outages fisheries. Yeah,
they can get in the way where people are trying
to fish for something else. Ah, they're getting their jellyfish. Yeah.
(43:29):
And there's been examples of all this stuff happening over time,
Like they shut down the USS Ronald Reagan once, which
is a nuclear powered warship, because it got a bunch
of jellyfish got sucked up into the cooling system. Um.
They've shut down power plants in India, in Japan, in
the Philippines. Um. And they think there's there's if there's
(43:54):
a debate over whether comb jellies and jellyfish are related.
There's a huge bait over whether or not we're seeing
a natural outcome of uh, just jellyfish life cycles blooms,
like this is just happening. Yeah, is this a normal
thing or are we humans contributing to it? And if
(44:16):
we humans are contributing to it, they basically say, there's
probably one of four ways that this is happening. Yeah.
One of them is overfishing basically just less competition for food. Uh.
They they're eating this zooplankton, and if other fish that
normally eat that aren't there, then the jellyfish like sweet
more for me, think buffet open. Apparently jellyfish students are
(44:39):
not known to go on diets. They just gorge themselves constantly.
Really Yeah, what else nutrients? Yeah, when we uh, when
we release fertilizers from crop land in two areas where
jellyfish live, we can cause algia blooms. It runs off
eventually into the sea. Yeah, and it I actually can
(45:00):
deplete oxygen. So there's two things. One, you've got a
bunch of zooplankton and phytoplankton, which, um, well, I guess
they're eating the zooplankton that jellyfish eat, right, and then
you have lower oxygen, which jellyfish can live in and
survive in a lot more easily because again they have
a much lower metabolism than most other organisms that they're
(45:24):
competing for food with. So their competition again is dying off.
While they're just like, this is great, I'll just keep
eating moral they thank you humans for putting all this
nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. You start to get
the idea why these things have been around for five
seven hundred million years. They can compete uh climate change
with the warming ocean. UM. Some of those jellies love it. UH.
(45:47):
Their embryos and larvae developed better and more quickly, so
the populations grow more quickly, and a lot of them
prefer that warmer water, so they say bring it on, yeah,
and they're actually like it's There was at least one
study that UM looked at how jellyfish reproduced in warmer
water and also water that's of higher acidity, which they're
(46:11):
predicting through ocean acidification UM, which is the result of
higher c O two increases, and both of those suggests
that jellyfish are going to do just fine under the
climate change that we're facing. So cockroaches and jellyfish are
the only things that are going to be around one day. Uh.
And then finally what they call ocean sprawl. Um, it's
(46:33):
you know what, we're building things out in the middle
of the ocean now, drilling platforms and docks and oil platforms. Uh,
hard structures and jellyfish. The polyps especially that we were
talking about that they attached to something sand or Cheryl
lads belly button is not the easiest thing to attach to. Oh,
(46:54):
Cheryl lad was born without a belly button. That's the
claim to faint. That was very insensitive of me. Uh,
you just threw me there. So what they do love
to attach to is something solid, So they love, Um,
they love attaching onto the ocean sprawl and oil rigs
and whatever else is out there, and they do very
well attached to a firm uh. Not the cher Lads
(47:17):
belly button isn't firm. It's done existing, certainly not an
iron girder. So. Um, there's this really great story about
jellyfish and just how quickly they can take over right Um,
in the Black Sea. When a ship releases its cargo,
is it off the coast of Germany. Yeah, No, that's
(47:40):
the North and the Baltic. Okay, don't try and screw
me up here. This is the Black Sea where they
make caviar, right, um, And actually there's some like entire
national economies are based on things like caviar and um,
sardines and anchovies and just all these amazing fish. And
this ship apparently took on some seawater after it released
(48:04):
its cargo to keep itself stable, right, And when it
got to the Black Sea, it released it. And one
of the things that released was this type of jellyfish
called the sea walnut. And this is a two sounds cute.
So the first sea walnut makes its way into the
Black Sea. In two thousand two, the total biomass of
(48:24):
sea walnuts in the Black Sea, just the Black Sea,
was ten times the total biomass of all the fish
that were taken from the world's oceans by commercial fishing.
It got jellyfied, basically, Yeah. And they were competing with um,
the the the other fish for the zooplankton and the
(48:47):
food source and winning big time. And so all these
fisheries collapsed, all these economies were in trouble, and then
it just so happened that some other ship had picked
up a different type of jellyfish that actually was a
natural predator of the sea wall all night and came
along and saved the day totally by a stroke of luck.
To see walnut cracker. Yeah, yep, I did see that.
(49:08):
Actually you sent me that. That's amazing. Yep. So it
all worked out. Everything about jellyfish is amazing. Yeah, final
score for me octopus one jellyfish. Whoa, that is close.
It is nice. Just one three pointer at the end
could have won it, but it didn't. Nope, it rimmed out.
(49:32):
So if you want to know more you got anything else? Nope.
You want to know more about jellyfish and comb jellies
and that kind of stuff, You can type those words
into the search part how stuff works dot com. And
since I said search parts time for listener mail, that's right,
it's three pm, which means, uh, our bedtime is just
in about four short hours. Um. I actually tried to
(49:57):
go to bed before my one year old daughter the
other night. Yeah, and I said, no, that's bad parenting.
Sure you just so you put yourself to bed. Oh wait,
And she finally drifted off at like a thirty and
I was out at eight thirty two. Um, all right,
I'm gonna call this you help me get married? Hey, guys,
so recently got married to my beautiful wife, congratulations, with
(50:20):
whom I've been with for over eight years. While the
prospect of being married to her never frightened me at all,
the thought of having to be in the center of attention,
professing my love to my then fiance in front of
all of our guests and try not to look like
a dummy during the ceremony was how do you say, nauseatingly, frightening, terrifying.
Excuse me, Um, yeah, Stephen was not He's not a
(50:41):
public speaker, I don't think. However, during the hours leading
up to the ceremony, I kept my mind occupied by
listening to the melodious tones of your voices teaching me
about well, some things I really don't remember. Honestly, I
was a little occupied. So we were literally just like,
what is it called a s mr, Yeah, just his tones.
(51:03):
He didn't even know what we were talking about. It
was just the sounds of our voices suited him, which
is very nice. Yeah, it is nice. Regardless, guys. Everything
ultimately went very well and we are both now very
happy to be together for good and to not have
to plan a wedding again. Thank you for helping me
get through the worst of my pre wedding anxiety. I
(51:24):
I's gonna say the worst day of my life at first.
And for making such a terrific podcast. And that is
Stephen Hall, who's a PhD candidate in pharmacology. Well thanks
a lot, Stephen, congratulations. Send us some as annex poppet
in the mail. He's a candidate, a PhD candidate, he
(51:46):
doesn't have access to that kind of stuff. Well, I
guarantee you he won't be a candidate anymore if he
starts sending us. There's mailing people pharmacutic give him his badge, Steven,
don't listen to Chuck. If you want to get in
touch with us for any reason whatsoever, you can tweet
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join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to stuff podcast at
(52:07):
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Heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello, everyone, It's October sixt What No, but this is
Chuck from the future past telling you to listen to
the selects pick for the week Jellyfish colon even cooler
than the OCTOPI you decide. Welcome to Stuff You should Know,
(00:22):
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant with Jerry st You should know. Oh man,
let's start over all right, Well, that's okay. How you doing.
(00:46):
I'm good. I'm jet black still, I'm coming out of
it for sure, but yeah, I'm a little jetlike. I
just was explaining off Mike that my body is at
four thirty or five every morning. Does get up, dummy?
It's ten fifteen eleven, And I go, no, it's not.
It's dark. No internal struggle. And it's a British voice too.
(01:12):
It's like, get up, you need your beans and blood,
sausage and import pies. How was that? Oh man, I
want another one so bad, you know? Save that? Okay? Uh?
My jet leg is not so much pronounced in the morning,
it's just at nine thirty at night. I fall over
wherever I'm standing or said, you're just like cooking in
(01:34):
a walk and you just fall face for it. First
you noticed the burned face. Yeah, that's dangerous. Well it
hurt pretty bad because that walk grease gets pretty hot,
it does walk. What is this? What walks? Who walks? Still? Dude?
You kidney? No dark continents of people watch? Oh well sure,
(01:56):
but I just I guess I just imagined like wearing
a tennis or tied around my back. And I didn't
say fond should you're having a fond part of boiling cheese.
That's pretty seventies. You know what, if you ever want
a fond dupot and like because you think it'd be
(02:16):
fun to have a fond party, don't buy one new.
Just go to a goodwill. I went for like three dollars. Yeah,
you mean I have an unused one? Is it pea green?
I don't know if I would cook out of a
pea green anything? No? Yeah, all right, no, I wouldn't
pe green refrigerator. I wouldn't need out of it p
(02:40):
green car. I just throw up any time I want
to go drop uh, I'll tell you what I am
excited about though. Yeah, this is now officially my second
favorite seafaring creature after octopus, Yeah for sure. Yeah, and
this was close to like the jellyfish was really tugging
(03:02):
at my heartstrings. Yeah, and the and the octopus just
kept saying, you know what, remember me, remember the gramatophores.
Watch this bam. It looks at like something completely different.
And then I remember it. I was like, all right, octopus,
you're right, jellyfish can't do that. I'm Rocky the squirrel. Now,
I'm a romance soldier, I'm a cornucopia of vegetables in
(03:24):
an oil painting. Uh. They are pretty cool. Yeah, but
the jellyfish is really amazing. Yeah. The octopus is though
they're like they're doing it on purpose. The jellyfish just
accidentally kind of stumbles backwards into awesomeness. You know, well
after five million years of practice, maybe seven, Yeah, we'll see.
(03:46):
It's amazing. So when you're talking about jellyfish, a lot
of people say, well, there's a jellyfish, that's a jellyfish,
that's a jellyfish. That lady walking down the street with
the leash got a jellyfish on the end of right,
and and you would say jellyfish, jellyfish, comb, jelly dog,
or weird cat lady who walks her cat. Yeah, that's unwholesome.
(04:07):
That's as unwholesome as walking a jellyfish down this street
on a leash. So there are such things as comb jellies,
and there's jellyfish, and you out there who's lived maybe
ten twenty years on this planet or more, we've probably
seen them both. But it turns out that they look
very similar. But as we're finding out, as we get
(04:28):
deeper and deeper into using genetics to do taxonomy rather
than our peepers, that doesn't necessarily mean they're related. And
actually there's there's some tremendous debate between just how closely
related jellyfish and comb jellies are. Tremendous debate. Yes, we're
very subdued. It depends on where you are among like
fifty people. If you're in the jellyfish department of some
(04:51):
like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I'll bet it gets nuts
a little vigorous. Yeah, they down some some old English
forty uh right, malt liquor and argue and to get
out the brass knuckles about taxonomy. Uh so that the
two phila they are different. Uh, we're talking respectively for
jellyfish and comb jellies. Uh, nadaria and ton afera. Yeah, nice,
(05:17):
and there's seas before. Both of them are both silent,
so it looks like centa bites and sephora. Yeah. Cento bytes. Yeah,
what is that a centerbon? That's no center bites. They
were the monsters in hell Raiser. Oh I thought it
was like a centabon that was in handy bite sized pieces.
(05:39):
That's a cinabyte. These are cento bites. Gotcha? Where where
did this research come from? By the way, a big
shout out Smithsonian. They have a site called the Ocean
Portal amazing that has all sorts of great stuff on it. Yeah,
you can't go wrong with Smithsonian. That's their their logo.
There's there's this that forms the basis of this one.
(05:59):
But I also want to give a huge shout out
to another article I read a while back that I
went back and reread. Actually it's called They're taking Over
and it was a New York View Books article on it. Yeah. Uh,
well reviewed a book on jellyfish, Yes, specifically jellyfish blooms
or when you'll see on the news like, oh my gosh,
there's five thousand jellyfish right here, right now, or thirty
(06:23):
three thousand square miles of jellyfish. But we'll get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
were getting ahead of ourselves. So there's jellyfish and comb
jellies and there we don't know if they're related. They
look a lot like they're very much. Um, they seem related,
So we're gonna talk about both. Yes, right, so let's
talk about him, Chuck. All right, Well we'll start off
with the body, uh, because well they're kind of all body. Uh.
(06:46):
They both jellyfish income jellies have they have a lot
of differences, but you know, when you look under the hood,
they have a lot of similarities, which is why you
would expect when people use their peepers they would just think, well, yeah,
of course you have the same look at them. Yeah,
don't don't think too don't overthink it. That was early science.
Don't overthink it. So both of them have a couple
(07:08):
of major cell layers, the external epidermis and then the
internal one called the gastrodermist. And in between those is
what you think of as jellyfish. Yeah, that's the mesoglia, yeah,
which is a great name for that, and it's the filling. Yeah,
it's it's nine. And in fact, jellyfish and come jellies
(07:30):
are about water. Yeah, seawater actually salt and water. They're
basically made up of the sea. I saw it put somewhere. Yeah,
you know, it's amazing. Um. So they have basically one
mouth where um stuff goes in and comes out. It's
like a U mouth and oral anis basically I don't
(07:55):
even know if they refer to it as a mouth.
Do they like somewhere in this thing? Didn't they called
it literally like a body hole or something. Yeah, it's
it's a pretty basic, basic organism, but it does a
lot of things. Yeah, so it's not Yeah, when you
think of mouth, you just think eating. Not necessarily, Hey,
let's put some sperm and egg in there too. It's
like all purpose. Yeah, but they don't necessarily need in
(08:18):
a mouth for eating because apparently they can absorb nutrients
like just through their skin. Yeah, so they have they
don't have a stomach, they don't have intestines, they don't
have lungs. They're just like, get in my get in
my skin nutrients yeah, and oxygen, And if you think
about it, then they don't need lungs. They don't need
like a they don't need a mouth, so they don't
(08:41):
need to chew. All this stuff requires a lot of energy.
They actually are extraordinarily efficient organisms, so they get a
lot more energy out of the stuff that they take
in than other things, which actually gives them a huge
advantages we'll see later. Uh. So the outer cells, they
have this epidermis, like we said, and it has what's
(09:03):
called a nerve net, and it's just this net of
nerves literally, um, and that it's it's it's their nervous
system basically, and it's the it's the most basic, Um,
I guess, brain like structure of any organism on the planet,
of any multicellular organism. I guess that's right. And so
(09:23):
in the nerve net, not only does it have nerves,
it also has some sort of specialized cells, like some
that detect light so they can know that they need
to move away from that boat spotlight. Uh, and then
some that tell them whether they're moving up or down
or whether they're upside down. Yeah, big dummies, that's a
that's a big one. You think about it. But I mean,
(09:46):
like that's if you don't have eyeballs. No, But this
is the weird part. Man, this is so disturbing to me.
This is almost as disturbing as squid having beaks. Some
types of jellies, box jellies, in particular um box jellyfish
have eyes. They have retinas lenses, but they don't have
(10:08):
a brain. So scientists are like, how what how are
you processing these images that you're clearly taking in and
responding to, Like, we've shown you pictures of like um
Sheryl lad and you like gave a thumbs up. So
obviously you can use these eyes, but how are you
(10:28):
sorting these images? You know? Yeah, they think it's that
that nerve ring, but they're not sure, right, and that's
a ring around Uh, it's concentration of nerves basically that
they haven't figured out yet. But they think that's there
in is the secret. It would be like, um, it
(10:48):
would be like now, I can't come with a good analogy.
There's a million of them out there, but I'm not
still jet Like I guess I just want to apologize
to everybody because that could have been I was on
the edge of my seat. Uh. Uh. So comb jellies
they have a few things that the regular jelly does
not have. Uh. Most notably the comb their name for
(11:11):
these uh silia, these giant fuse cilia. There's eight rows
up and down their bodies and they basically are their
ways of locomotive neck like little bitty oars paddling around
in the water. And there are other animals that do this,
but the comb jelly is the largest one to do
this and to use this kind of locomotion. And it
(11:32):
looks like a rainbow if you look one up, but
you think it might be bioluminescent, but it's not. It's
just light catching the cilia and scattering it. It's beautiful,
It is quite beautiful. But that's the thing that that
separates comb jellies from jelly jellyfish most um pronounced lee right, Yeah,
because a lot of their activities and just the stuff
(11:56):
that they do, it's fairly similar the TV they watch,
but their means of locomotion are are really the big,
huge distinction. Yeah. The A lot of the comb jellies
have a single pair just two tentacles, but it looks
like more because they branch out um and they use
those like little fishing lines because they have sticky cells
uh color blast at the end. And this is different
(12:18):
uh big time than jellyfish. They don't sting. No, they
use um gluey, which is pretty neat, so you won't
be stung by a comb jelly. So just swim up
and hug one. They love it when you do that. So. Um,
when you think of a jellyfish, like a true jelly
is what what they're called. Um there you think of
(12:40):
like kind of this bell shaped umbrella shaped thing with
the tentacles hanging down. Beautiful. And if it's a jellyfish,
that's actually one of two forms that it will take
in its lifetime. Right, Um, it's that's the medusa form,
and it's it's the adult form. There's a juvenile form
called the all up and um. Depending on when it
(13:03):
is in its life cycle, it will either be in
a medusa form a polyp form. Yeah, and we'll get
into the little more of the life cycle. But a
polyp can end up becoming a medusa or just might
be happy as little polyp and to stay as a
poly up and create more meducea. Yeah, and the polyp
looks like um, it almost looks like a plant. It
(13:23):
looks like a little stalk attached to something, usually the
sand or as we'll see, maybe a oil rig out
in the middle of the ocean or something, or share
a lad. That's right, because she's she's a deep water
dweller at this point. Um. So it looks like a
little plant. It's got it looks like a little stalk,
(13:43):
and then the uh, tentacles are blooming out of it,
almost like a flower. Yeah, like anemone or something like that. Yeah.
And sometimes you see him many many of them together
in a colony. You think that's an amazing plant. It's
actually a jelly. Yeah, pretty cool if you would be
able to tell if you poked it with your finger.
That's right. So the size among jellies ants and um
(14:06):
comb jellies are I mean, some of are just microscopic,
others get pretty big. If there's one called the lion's
main jellyfish, which on the whole across like the whole species,
they are the largest jellyfish known to humankind. Did you
see this thing? Yeah, it looks like photoshop when you
see a scuba diver up next to one. It definitely does.
(14:29):
Like the bell actually gets to be six ft wide. Yeah,
And the tentacles are like, um long, fifty ft long,
and some some get bigger than that. But that's you know,
the average size of one of those. This is pretty neat. Yeah,
I mean they're not to be feared. But swimming up
(14:51):
to something that large and that kind of creepy looking
is not for me, that's all. I'll say. That eats anything,
it'll eat anything like people. Yeah, No, I won't need
a person. Yeah, I don't know. If they were big enough,
it might. All right, So let's talk a little bit
about the various types. Um. We'll start with Nadaria, which
(15:14):
is the the jellyfish itself, not the comb. There are
more than ten thousand species, uh, and about four thousand
or fewer actually are what we think of as the
true jelly the medusa that we know and love, uh.
And within that there are quite a few different types,
one of which is the skiff a zoa. And this
(15:37):
is the most common true jellyfish that you can imagine.
When you picture jelly fish in your mind, you're probably
thinking of the skiff a zoa um. The hydrozoa are
um impostors. Well, they're they're the ones who they spend
most of their time as polyps, right, So the skiff
(15:58):
a zoa spend most of their time in the medusas phase.
The hydrozoa are the ones that look like plants at
the bottom and are just reproducing like mad um, and
they actually can come together and create what are called
colonial siphon of force. And that's a you know, a
Portuguese man of war. Okay, So that is actually not
(16:21):
a true jellyfish. It's actually a collection. It's a it's
a colony that comes together to act like one large organism, right,
and it's made up of persons, so like there's the
person that is in charge of digestion, there's the person
that's in charge of catching prey. There's the person that's
in charge of locomotion. And rather than these things being
(16:43):
body parts, they're actually individual organisms that are genetically identical
to one another because they all come from the same egg.
But they're actually a colony. Does that make sense? Like,
imagine if your organs were various actual organisms that came
together to make you. It's like the polyphonic spree of
(17:04):
the ocean world. Exactly. It's amazing. That's exactly what I
was driving at. Uh. Next up we have the Cuba
zoa and that's you mentioned the box jellyfish. They look
like a box is more squared looking. Those are the
most dangerous ones. Yeah. They have the most potent venom
and it is stuff not just of jellyfish, of any
animal on the planet. Yeah, the sea wasp has the
(17:26):
most powerful venom for humans, I should say the sea wasp.
And that just awesome sounding. Yeah, it sounds like something
you want to avoid at all costs. Yeah. Uh so
these guys are the ones that have a more complex
nervous system, that have the the eyes right, Yeah, with
(17:46):
the corneas and things. So they're the most deadly and
they're looking at you. Yeah, they're saying, I'm coming for you.
The star o zoa stalk jellyfishes, and they don't float.
They are actually like to cling onto things and attached
to things, and they are mainly cold water. But all
you can find most all kinds are not all kinds.
(18:08):
You can find some kind of jellyfish and almost any
kind of water, any kind of ocean water in the world. Well,
not just that there's some thrive and freshwater. There's a
type of jellyfish that is um all over the Great Lakes.
It was originally it's native to China, and they think
that it was brought over originally from China to England
(18:29):
in like a water lily shipment, because it was first
discovered in the West in like garden ponds, and it
somehow made its way to the Great Lakes. And now
there's a freshwater jellyfish that's about I think the size
of your thumbnail, depending on what size your thumbnail is
in the Great Lakes. That's a jellyfish. And it's a
(18:49):
true jellyfish. And we should say also with um jellyfish locomotion,
they don't use the silly a like a comb jellyfish
does They in Medusa form x banned and contract the
bell right, so beautiful. And I was reading I think
it was a Scientific American or Popular Science, one of
those two all posted on the podcast Pitch, but it
(19:10):
was they some researchers examined how jellyfish move and they
found that not only are they like um able to
move when they when they expand and then contract in
the resting motion of their bell, of vortex actually forms
in the water above them and moves beneath them and
(19:31):
moves them up that way. So they're constantly moving, but
they're only exerting like half of the energy needed to
move forward. To propel forward or upward. Right, So that's
even one more way that they're incredibly efficient type of animal. Yeah,
without a brain, they're pretty smart, you know what I mean. Uh,
should we take a break? Yeah, all right, we'll take
(19:51):
a break, and we're gonna come back and dive into
the wonderful world of comb jellies. All right. So we
(20:21):
talked about just a few of the standard jellyfish. The
comb jellies are way way fewer species of the tina fours. Um,
we're talking I think ten thousand for the other this
is about a hundred fifty. Yeah, not even hundred fifty. Yeah,
But they're saying that it's possible that these are just
(20:43):
the ones we are aware of because um, we've encountered
them in coastal waters, that they may be way more
in deep sea. Yeah, they don't know much about those guys, right, right.
And the ones that are in deep see that we've
encountered tend to be so fragile that we can't collect them. Yeah,
because they're not tough, because they don't to put up
with the you know, their merrids and waves and yeah,
they just float out there and yeah, you look at
(21:05):
them too hard. And they crumble. Um. So one type
of a comb jelly is uh sodipid uh and they
are all around their spherical or oval. They have those
branch tentacles that we talked about. Those tentacles are a
little unique and that they can actually draw them back
into the body when it's cold, yeah, which is pretty cool.
Really okay, so I believe uh yeah. And they have
(21:29):
like sheets on the sides of their mouths that it
draws back into which is pretty cool amazing. Um. Then
there's low baits uh, which have lobes on the sides,
right yeah, um, and that's about it. They have the
lobes and that's what they're known for baroids. These are
(21:49):
kind of cool. These are the dudes that have no tentacles.
So the way they eat is they have a big,
big mouth that draws in a lot of stuff and
then a very tight, almost zipper like thing that shuts
and then they can shut that mouth really hard and
just mush all that stuff up. Well. They they have
silia inside their mouths that act like teeds that pull
(22:12):
their prey apart alive teeth tooth teeth. Yeah, oh man,
it's weird. Jet leg um. But the little the teeth
just pick it like their prey and just pull them apart.
It dissolves them, basically mechanically amazing. Have you ever seen
a video of um, the uh, the pelican who's just
(22:33):
standing there and there's a pigeon like on the ground
right in front of him, and all of a sudden
the pigeon the pelican just eats the pigeon, and the
pigeons like trying to get out of the pelicans like
huge mouth, and the pelicans just sitting there like nothing's happening.
And then finally like the pigeon stops moving. It is
really disturbing because you you you know, like pelicans don't
(22:54):
normally eat live pigeons, so there's like there's something wrong
with this pelican or it was just then steely reserve,
like no remorse whatsoever. Yeah, it's a it's a disconcerting video,
especially if you're a pigeon lover, which I'm not. I'm
it sound like I hate pigeons, but you don't want
to see him get you know, eaten eaten by a pelican. Yeah,
(23:16):
it's it's weird. It's totally strange. Where do you find
this stuff? It's around so weird. I think you may
showed me that one. Yeah. You guys always have a
lot of weird videos at your fingertips. You and you
we were just always talking about, like did you see
the one where you know, the pelican ate the pigeon. Yeah,
I guess so that's pretty neat. Um Comb jellies distribution wise,
(23:40):
they are also all over the oceans. Uh. They do
perform a little warmer water though, but you can't find
them anywhere, right. Um. So we're talking earlier about the
fact that they are from different phyla and that there's this,
you know, drunken argument going on among scientists at the
Monterey Bay aquari about how how closely related they are. Um.
(24:02):
They used to all be described as uh sellin slinarata,
which is hollow bellied. Oh yeah, makes sense, But they don't.
They don't say that anymore. And if you want to
be ridiculed by your peers, call them that. But some
people say, you know, their sister groups. Some people say, nope,
they're not even that closely related. Uh So the debate
(24:25):
rages on. I guess yep. So, Um, what what's interesting
is that we even know how long jellies have been
around because there they have no solid parts. Yeah, you'd
think it'd be hard to find a fossil. They have
gelatinous parts, they don't have any hardened parts. Yeah, that
would be fossilized easily. But there have been some discoveries,
(24:45):
some amazing discoveries of jellyfish and um comb jellies from
about five million years ago. It's the I believe, the
oldest known specimens found. And there's this one found in
Utah because apparently Utah used to be a shallow inland
sea and it had these jellyfish in it. And I
guess something happened to this jellyfish. It was crushed by
(25:07):
a rock, something a lot of pressure, I would think,
but all of a sudden it just captured it. Because
it's it's like a perfect it's like a drawing of
the jellyfish in a rock. Um And it's the oldest
fossil and it's five million years old. So it was
a pretty lucky find actually to find this, this jellyfish
(25:28):
that should not have been fossilized, that was fossilized. So
we do know that there um about two hundred or
a hundred and fifty million years older than fish fish
weren't even around by then. Um, and they think that
possibly sea comb or jelly comb or sorry, comb jellies
were Um, it's possible they were the earliest animals to
(25:50):
branch off, even more even earlier than sponges. Well, didn't
they find that the jellyfish was the first animal in
the sea that didn't just float along like a dummy,
that actually used muscles to swim places. Yeah, and it
was possible it was the comb jellies that did that.
So it's possible that comb jellies branched off from the
(26:10):
tree of life, so it's just one type of animal.
Then all of a sudden, there's a comb jelly. Right,
what is this black magic you speak of? Right? And
then maybe the jellyfish at some later point branched off
of the comb jelly right. Um, But either way, it
would have been the comb jelly and or the jellyfish
that were the first to say we're going this way. Yeah,
(26:31):
you guys are just floating around like a bunch of
morons waiting for food to hit You were embarrassed for you. Well,
speaking of food, they are all carnivorous and they eat,
like you said, they'll eat anything. They love plankton, but
they eat fish. They eat crustaceans. Some eat other jellyfish,
which is disgusting. Um, and those uh neumaticist and color blasts,
(26:56):
the stingers or the glue guns. Um, they are good
for defense. But uh, there are a hundred and fifty
animals that also eat the jellies. Fish and sea turtles.
There's the sunfish loves them. Weather back seat turtles love them.
They they journey to find them. Yeah, that's how much
they love them. The Chinese, Yeah, they eat human beings
(27:20):
eat jellyfish. Yeah. It's apparently a wedding delicacy in China
and has been for about fifteen sixteen hundred years. Yeah,
ours is catered salmon in uh chicken Marbella. Uh yeah,
fo thousand tons of jellyfish are caught each year in
fifteen countries, mainly in Southeast Asia's where they're eating these. Yeah,
(27:43):
but um, I read that Georgia, our state of Georgia,
um has a commercial jellyfish fishery. Really big Gem's jellies
preserved Moonshina. You totally eat jellyfish? Would sure I would
try it? Yeah, apparently it's also um it's served in Japan. Too,
it's salted, which would be good. I would try raw.
(28:07):
I would try raw jellyfish and sushi or something like that,
but I would guess that salted strips and jellyfish are
probably vastly preferable. I'm not nearly as adventurous as you
with my my mouth and my stomach, but I might
try jellyfish, even though I'm talking about how much I
love it. Right, you just cry while you ate? Yeah, exactly.
(28:34):
You were so beautiful once. Um. Well, I would eat
um wooly mammoth. Oh yeah, and you like them? Yeah? Uh,
you gotta bring floss? Would you eat woly mammoth? Supposedly
that does nothing? Have you heard about that? Oh? Yeah?
Then the new studies its flossing is no good. Well,
we talked about that. I think what they said. It
(28:56):
depends on who you talk to. Some people are saying like, no,
they just realize that no one's ever done a scientific
study to back up that flossing is good for you.
And other people are saying like, no, they did some
studies and found that it doesn't do anything, which I
cannot believe. We either just talked about this the last
recording session, or we talked about it on stage. We
(29:16):
probably talked about it on stage because it came out
while we were in the UK. Okay, yeah, all right,
but the idea that getting rotting food out from between
your teeth has no positive health benefits for you is
just it defies explanation. It was on stage because I
made a crack about missing my teeth. Oh yeah, I
remember now, uh. Feeding As far as them feeding on
(29:39):
other things, we talked about these tentacles that they have
to capture prey and these nematicists. It's amazing these basically
they're described in the article as venom bearing harpoons. So
what happens is there's a cue. Uh it's either something
has touched them or it's a chemical uh que that
(30:00):
something is around, and they shoot out this little harpoon
and within seven hundred nana seconds it's spears the prey
and releases a toxin. Yes, and it's it's frightening. Yeah.
If you um, if you're a fish, you're in trouble.
If you're another jellyfish, you're in trouble. Something smaller than
(30:22):
that you're just totally dead. And depending on the jellyfish,
if you're a human being, you can die as a
matter of fact too. Yes, we talk about that, dude. Yeah,
so the um there's the sea wasp obviously, which has
the most toxic venom on earth as far as humans
are concerned. But then there's also another type of um
box jellyfish that are much tinier. I think they're about
(30:43):
thumbsized or peanut sized. Yeah, you could. You don't even
see these things, or if you do see them and
they brush against you, you're probably not even gonna feel
the stings called ariicanji, Yeah, which is a an Aboriginal
word for for this type of jellyfish. Right, there's a
dude in the sixties, a Westerner who um was like,
(31:05):
what what is with this jellyfish? I I've heard weird
things about it. I don't know much about it. I'm
gonna go out and let myself get stung by one.
Where did he get killed very easily by something at
any given point Australia, Yeah, exactly, because they're the ones.
They've got the sea wasps too, and they have to
do with the sea wasps. Saying these little guys the
eru kanji. Is that how we agreed we're gonna say it. Yeah,
(31:26):
iri kanji Iri kanji. So this guy survived, but he
um not not well, but he had a hard time
getting to the point where they're like, you're going to survive. Yeah,
he was lucky to survive. So you get a sting
from one of these things, just a single tannicle, apparently
in about twenty to thirty minutes, what's called ira Kanji
(31:47):
syndrome starts to sit in and you feel it in
your lower back first, right, Yeah, and you don't know
you've been stunk. So you're just like, oh, man, like
I tweaked my back out there in the ocean, and
then things really start going south. Then you go and
throw up your right kidney. Yeah. And this article you
said said it feels like someone hits you with a
(32:09):
baseball bat and your kidneys and then comes to nausea
and vomiting, which continues every minute or so for around
twelve hours. Yeah. You get spasms in your arms and legs,
your blood pressure increases, your skin begins to creep. It
says as if worms are burrowing through it. Yeah. Saw
I saw a video of a guy who was stung
and he said it felt like someone was pouring acid
(32:31):
all over my body. Yea from just being brushed by
this thumb sized, tiny little jellyfish. And then there's this
is the creepiest thing to me, says. Victims are often
gripped with a sense of impending doom and begged their
doctors to kill them. Yeah, can you imagine. And they're
spreading their range. Actually they found him off the coast
(32:51):
of Florida. They found him off the coast of South Africa. Jeez. Yeah,
So yeah, they're not to be messed with, alright, So
down with your kanji? Right? Have you ever heard that
you should pee on somebody who's been stung by a jellyfish?
I've seen friends, so that's not true. And they've actually
found that could make it worse. Yeah, but there's actually
(33:12):
some science to it. Right, So if you get if
you get stung by a jellyfish, if it's technacle hits you,
and and you're stung by a nematicist, there may be
some leftover ones still attached to your arm, right, and
you want to get rid of those. But if you
get rid of them, if you pour they just fresh
water on them, you're gonna trigger You're gonna trigger the
(33:36):
little harpoons inside because they're held in place by a
specific concentration of salutes. Right, so if you change that
concentration by hitting it with freshwater, you're gonna set them off.
You seawater because they're held in check in seawater normally.
So you see water to wash it off, and then
you take a credit card and scrape the rest of
(33:57):
them off. But some kind of you know, what if
you if you don't have your credit card on you,
sure if you're not. But supposedly you're supposed to keep
sand out of it, which is tough to do. Sure,
I did the beach. I did it. Don't be dumb
on it. Years back on the what you do in
the chair, all sorts of weird stuff you remember, all right, Well,
(34:19):
getting back to the feeding. Uh, we covered the harpoon.
Themis of the jelly, but the comb jelly like we
talked about earlier that um, this is the neumaticis they
have the glue instead of the venom. So what they
do is they just send out that fishing line and
release that sticky glue and it reels whatever it catches
(34:40):
right on into the mouth. Pretty cool, like something being
sucked towards the death star. Yeah, exact a tractor beam.
You got caught in attractor beam. Basically, should we take
a break. Oh wait, there was one other thing, so
one type of comb jelly. This is so awesome. They
actually eat true jellies, and then they take their nomadicists
(35:02):
and use them for their own hunting. How like? How
so they think they absorbed them and shoot them out
in their teammates save them? Yeah, they took him in
their cheek for later. Can they get an unlimited supply
of these? I don't know. It's curious if you could
see one with like three hundred of them. Look, look
(35:22):
how many I've eaten. It's like, don't be a pig.
Sure you spit some of those out. Uh now, can
we take a break? Yes? All right. By the way,
we just satisfied that one listener because you rejected my break.
Oh yeah, that's true. How about that man a lie?
All right, we'll be back and talk a little bit
about defense. All right, So I promised talk of defense. Um,
(36:09):
these things you've probably seen, jellyfish and comb jellies that
produce light, this bioluminescence. Although when I said earlier, the
comb jelly when it looks colorful, that is not bioluminescence.
They are still bioluminescent, just not in that way right,
so confusing. They actually do produce light. Uh, they have
these proteins that have a chemical reaction to produce this
(36:31):
blue and green light when something might touch it. And yeah,
like moon jellies are well known for this. Yeah, and
they're not exactly sure why, but they think that this
could be a defensive mechanism to like either scare someone
trying to eat you by turning a light on their
face or turning a light on and attracting something larger
to eat that thing. Either way, they think it's defense.
(36:53):
And then alternately, some jellyfish have um camouflage actually not
as good as the US No, no, no, no, not
at all, but I mean obviously some are are most
are transparent. It's pretty good camouflage um. And then some
of the deep sea ones are actually red. They produce
a red pigment and the red apparently is very very
(37:16):
difficult to see in deep water, which is like two
or more where there's no light. Yeah, you think it
would be black, but they say that the red is
easier to produce and exactly, so black would work. It's
just you try making black pigment. You can't and reds
the same down there. Yeah, it's all black. It's all
(37:36):
the same. So um, some of them do that, and
then others have just red pigment in their gut that
if they eat a bioluminescent organism, it's not going to
accidentally attract a predator to come check them out. Interesting. See,
this is really the octopus is threatened in my heart
still a little bit now that I'm talking about this man,
(37:59):
it's unstable. We'll see. I'll give a final vote at
the end. So to me, this is now we get
to the most amazing part, well, one of the most
amazing parts about jelly's sexy. Yeah so, which is not
very sexy, no, although it's like every kind of sex
you can imagine jellyfish engage in, and not just different
(38:21):
species like individuals. Some are hermaphroditic, some are sexually divided,
some are a sexual yep, some yeah, some reproduce a
sexually sometimes in some species like the moon jelly, I
believe they'll all get together in one big mass and
(38:41):
just start swapping sperms and eggs. Yep, spit them out
of that mouth, hoole. There, get some boxed wine. The
parties on put on, Michael Bolton, though your house, your
house keys in a big wooden bowl right now, you
have it. That's the jellyfish way. Uh So the medusa
that that you know and love is the main true
(39:03):
jelly They spawn. So what they do is they release
a bunch of eggs and sperm into the open ocean
a lot of times altogether. And they do this from
their mouth hole and take it in in their mouth hole,
and uh, the sperm meets the egg and that's how
(39:24):
it happens. Yeah, ideally or um in some kinds, the uh,
the eggs stay in the mouth of the female and
the male just shoots sperm out into the water and
the sperm find their way into the mouth. It's a
way to go, yeah, Or they fertilize outside in the water,
like you were saying. Um. And then in others there
(39:49):
they don't even necessarily get together. Yeah, they'll just be
like a pollop will just be sitting there spewing out
sperm or eggs. Gam eats like a all day long
huh one one type spews out like forty through forty
six thousand a day, every day, all the time. Um,
(40:10):
And then the whole idea is that eventually maybe it'll
run into another gam eat and fertilize out. That's the
comb jelly actually, Oh is that a comb that does that? Okay.
The polyps are the ones that are a sexual and
they just bud and divide in half basically to produce
a little identical buddy. And then that can stay a polyp,
(40:30):
or it can eventually become a medusa. Yeah, because that's
the thing, like the polyp is a it's a stage
of a jellyfish, the jellyfish life cycle. It can be
which can be it? Yeah, you can you can just
stay a polyp, or you can eventually become a medusa. Yeah,
And we didn't say that the the Depending on the jellyfish,
(40:51):
it might live for a few weeks or a year.
Apparently they do better in captivity and tend to live
up to several years in captivity. I get the idea.
They're pretty fragile out there in the ocean. Yeah. Um,
but they can reproduce so frequently and so early on
in their life cycle, um that they can populate an
(41:12):
area very quickly to despite having a very short lifespan. Uh.
And then in the polyp stage, some species can stay
there for well, basically almost indefinitely, and just sit there
and reproduce. There's a type of reproduction in the polyp
stage where um, it's called strobe lation, and the little
polyp is sitting there just shooting off these little discs,
(41:36):
ten to fifteen at a time. And they found that
depending on the temperature of the water, um, and the
warmer the water, the more they strobo late um, they'll
there'll be more and more jellyfish that they just kind
of shoot off like this article put it like shooting
off clay pigeons, right, and then each one just transforms
into a medusa. Man, that's amazing. Octopus. Yeah, it's in trouble. Uh.
(42:02):
And then oh, this is super cool. The Tautopsis neutricula.
It is basically immortal. It is a hydrozoan and it
can actually revert back to the poly up stage after
the medusa stage through trans differentiation and live forever essentially
unless it gets killed obviously by something. Uh. And it
(42:25):
is the only animal that anyone knows of that can
do this. Yeah, amazing. There's another type of teratopsis to that. Um.
When it dies, it disintegrates, but it sells some cells
as it's as it's decaying, come back and form another individual. Yea.
(42:46):
So it basically fertilizes itself using its dying body and regenerates.
This is like, yeah, it's tapped into the force. All right.
So we talked earlier about these jellyfish blooms, um or
outbreaks or plagues, worms what else. That's okay, Um, it's
(43:08):
great that these things are proliferating like other species that aren't.
But it can get out of hand. It can interfere
with people. Uh, it can interfere with machinery at power
plants on the coast, cause power outage, outages fisheries. Yeah,
they can get in the way where people are trying
to fish for something else. Ah, they're getting their jellyfish. Yeah.
(43:29):
And there's been examples of all this stuff happening over time,
Like they shut down the USS Ronald Reagan once, which
is a nuclear powered warship, because it got a bunch
of jellyfish got sucked up into the cooling system. Um.
They've shut down power plants in India, in Japan, in
the Philippines. Um. And they think there's there's if there's
(43:54):
a debate over whether comb jellies and jellyfish are related.
There's a huge bait over whether or not we're seeing
a natural outcome of uh, just jellyfish life cycles blooms,
like this is just happening. Yeah, is this a normal
thing or are we humans contributing to it? And if
(44:16):
we humans are contributing to it, they basically say, there's
probably one of four ways that this is happening. Yeah.
One of them is overfishing basically just less competition for food. Uh.
They they're eating this zooplankton, and if other fish that
normally eat that aren't there, then the jellyfish like sweet
more for me, think buffet open. Apparently jellyfish students are
(44:39):
not known to go on diets. They just gorge themselves constantly.
Really Yeah, what else nutrients? Yeah, when we uh, when
we release fertilizers from crop land in two areas where
jellyfish live, we can cause algia blooms. It runs off
eventually into the sea. Yeah, and it I actually can
(45:00):
deplete oxygen. So there's two things. One, you've got a
bunch of zooplankton and phytoplankton, which, um, well, I guess
they're eating the zooplankton that jellyfish eat, right, and then
you have lower oxygen, which jellyfish can live in and
survive in a lot more easily because again they have
a much lower metabolism than most other organisms that they're
(45:24):
competing for food with. So their competition again is dying off.
While they're just like, this is great, I'll just keep
eating moral they thank you humans for putting all this
nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. You start to get
the idea why these things have been around for five
seven hundred million years. They can compete uh climate change
with the warming ocean. UM. Some of those jellies love it. UH.
(45:47):
Their embryos and larvae developed better and more quickly, so
the populations grow more quickly, and a lot of them
prefer that warmer water, so they say bring it on, yeah,
and they're actually like it's There was at least one
study that UM looked at how jellyfish reproduced in warmer
water and also water that's of higher acidity, which they're
(46:11):
predicting through ocean acidification UM, which is the result of
higher c O two increases, and both of those suggests
that jellyfish are going to do just fine under the
climate change that we're facing. So cockroaches and jellyfish are
the only things that are going to be around one day. Uh.
And then finally what they call ocean sprawl. Um, it's
(46:33):
you know what, we're building things out in the middle
of the ocean now, drilling platforms and docks and oil platforms. Uh,
hard structures and jellyfish. The polyps especially that we were
talking about that they attached to something sand or Cheryl
lads belly button is not the easiest thing to attach to. Oh,
(46:54):
Cheryl lad was born without a belly button. That's the
claim to faint. That was very insensitive of me. Uh,
you just threw me there. So what they do love
to attach to is something solid, So they love, Um,
they love attaching onto the ocean sprawl and oil rigs
and whatever else is out there, and they do very
well attached to a firm uh. Not the cher Lads
(47:17):
belly button isn't firm. It's done existing, certainly not an
iron girder. So. Um, there's this really great story about
jellyfish and just how quickly they can take over right Um,
in the Black Sea. When a ship releases its cargo,
is it off the coast of Germany. Yeah, No, that's
(47:40):
the North and the Baltic. Okay, don't try and screw
me up here. This is the Black Sea where they
make caviar, right, um, And actually there's some like entire
national economies are based on things like caviar and um,
sardines and anchovies and just all these amazing fish. And
this ship apparently took on some seawater after it released
(48:04):
its cargo to keep itself stable, right, And when it
got to the Black Sea, it released it. And one
of the things that released was this type of jellyfish
called the sea walnut. And this is a two sounds cute.
So the first sea walnut makes its way into the
Black Sea. In two thousand two, the total biomass of
(48:24):
sea walnuts in the Black Sea, just the Black Sea,
was ten times the total biomass of all the fish
that were taken from the world's oceans by commercial fishing.
It got jellyfied, basically, Yeah. And they were competing with um,
the the the other fish for the zooplankton and the
(48:47):
food source and winning big time. And so all these
fisheries collapsed, all these economies were in trouble, and then
it just so happened that some other ship had picked
up a different type of jellyfish that actually was a
natural predator of the sea wall all night and came
along and saved the day totally by a stroke of luck.
To see walnut cracker. Yeah, yep, I did see that.
(49:08):
Actually you sent me that. That's amazing. Yep. So it
all worked out. Everything about jellyfish is amazing. Yeah, final
score for me octopus one jellyfish. Whoa, that is close.
It is nice. Just one three pointer at the end
could have won it, but it didn't. Nope, it rimmed out.
(49:32):
So if you want to know more you got anything else? Nope.
You want to know more about jellyfish and comb jellies
and that kind of stuff, You can type those words
into the search part how stuff works dot com. And
since I said search parts time for listener mail, that's right,
it's three pm, which means, uh, our bedtime is just
in about four short hours. Um. I actually tried to
(49:57):
go to bed before my one year old daughter the
other night. Yeah, and I said, no, that's bad parenting.
Sure you just so you put yourself to bed. Oh wait,
And she finally drifted off at like a thirty and
I was out at eight thirty two. Um, all right,
I'm gonna call this you help me get married? Hey, guys,
so recently got married to my beautiful wife, congratulations, with
(50:20):
whom I've been with for over eight years. While the
prospect of being married to her never frightened me at all,
the thought of having to be in the center of attention,
professing my love to my then fiance in front of
all of our guests and try not to look like
a dummy during the ceremony was how do you say, nauseatingly, frightening, terrifying.
Excuse me, Um, yeah, Stephen was not He's not a
(50:41):
public speaker, I don't think. However, during the hours leading
up to the ceremony, I kept my mind occupied by
listening to the melodious tones of your voices teaching me
about well, some things I really don't remember. Honestly, I
was a little occupied. So we were literally just like,
what is it called a s mr, Yeah, just his tones.
(51:03):
He didn't even know what we were talking about. It
was just the sounds of our voices suited him, which
is very nice. Yeah, it is nice. Regardless, guys. Everything
ultimately went very well and we are both now very
happy to be together for good and to not have
to plan a wedding again. Thank you for helping me
get through the worst of my pre wedding anxiety. I
(51:24):
I's gonna say the worst day of my life at first.
And for making such a terrific podcast. And that is
Stephen Hall, who's a PhD candidate in pharmacology. Well thanks
a lot, Stephen, congratulations. Send us some as annex poppet
in the mail. He's a candidate, a PhD candidate, he
(51:46):
doesn't have access to that kind of stuff. Well, I
guarantee you he won't be a candidate anymore if he
starts sending us. There's mailing people pharmacutic give him his badge, Steven,
don't listen to Chuck. If you want to get in
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(52:07):
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