I stood
on the deck of a ship, this summer, looking out over the briny green of the
great Pacific Ocean. How lucky I was to have such a vacation. I watched the
smooth shiny ripples beneath me, carefully, hoping to see some sort of creature
of the sea. Well, someone must have heard me wishing, because a white gleam suddenly
appeared among the waves. Then another and another.
Jellyfish!
Moon Jellies to be specific! And quite a number of them. Apparently a whole
group of them are called a “smack”. These
pretty little animals are kind of startling to see the first time. With their
clear, gelatinous bodies with four little buttons in the middle, they’re kind
of hard to fathom. Clearly, they have no bones or muscles, but the truth is
they don’t appear to have much of anything else, either.
Scientists
tell us that Moon Jellies have no brains or hearts. A nerve net powers their
pulsating movements. They eat by catching plankton and using their small
tentacles to push the food into their mouths. And they “breath”, not through
lungs or gills of any kind, but by diffusing oxygen from the water around them.
Oh, and
those four little buttons? Reproductive organs, of all things!
Although
they largely just float around and let the tide take them where it will, they’ve,
nevertheless, travelled much further than you have. In 1991, NASA sent over
2000 of these into outer space to study the effects of weightlessness on
jellyfish.
Wow!
For such simple looking blobs, they sure are complicated little miracles!
One
last amazing thing. The Moon Jellies average in size from 5 to 40 centimetres
in diameter. That’s about the size of a tea saucer to a dinner plate at the
largest. One time, when we were kids, as we explored a particularly large smack
of Moon Jellies that floated past our summer vacation spot, we saw one of the
dinner plate guys in the crowd. He was so big, it took two hands to scoop him
up for a better look. But that’s nothing. Another species of jellyfish, known
as Lion’s Mane, grow just a tad bigger than that. A specimen that washed ashore
in Massachusetts in 1870 had a bell (or upper body) that was over 7 feet in
diameter and tentacles that stretched to 120 feet! That’s longer than some
whales!
Oh my!
The best treasures in the ocean are definitely the ones Mother Nature put
there!
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