SYSK Selects: Jellyfish - Even Cooler Than Octopi?

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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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 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, 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.

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. 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 a break, and we're gonna come back and dive into the wonderful world of comb jellies. All right. So we

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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

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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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, 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

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,

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. 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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. 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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 to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know.

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