My First Project

I just finished my first project this year.  I am posting it on my blog so you all can see it.  So here it is.

Jellyfish

What do you think of when you hear the word jellyfish?  Do you imagine the beautiful moon jellies from the zoo?  Or the Portuguese man-of-war with its 60 foot long tentacles?  Or the deadly sea wasp that can kill a human with one sting?.  But what do you really know about jellyfish?  I believe that people should know more about jellyfish because they are such amazing creatures.

Jellyfish are amazingly simple creatures without a brain, heart, lungs, or many other things that are found in humans and more complex creatures.  However like us jellyfish have layers of skin, with the dermis on the outside and the gastro dermis on the inside and a jelly like substance in between.  Jelly fish also have a reproductive organ and a stomach that attaches directly to its mouth.  The mouth is a hole in the middle of the body with feeder arms surrounding it.  Most jelly fish also have tentacles around their bodies that have stinger cells in them.

Jelly fish are also somewhat like butterflies and frogs in that they go through many stages before becoming the floating umbrella or bell shaped adults we know.  First the female creates eggs and the male releases sperm to fertilize them. Then the eggs mature into larva which floats until they find a solid place to land.  Next the larva becomes a polyp which looks like a tiny anemone.  After months or sometimes years the polyp begins to transform.  Horizontal slits appear in their bodies and grow until they go straight through making the polyp into a stack of discs.  Each of these discs is a baby jellyfish.  Occasionally a polyp may also create a bud before it transforms and that bud is a clone of the polyp which will eventually split off and become another stack of baby jellyfish.

So why do jellyfish need stingers exactly? Well one reason is that they are the tools they use to catch their food.  Jellyfish eat almost anything that they can catch from zooplankton and fish, to small crabs and even other jellyfish.  Jellyfish usually just float until their tentacles come in contact with their food. The stingers in the tentacles paralyze the fish or whatever else they might touch and then the jelly fish can pull the food up to their mouth and eat it.

Another reason for the stingers is self defense.  Lots of other marine life likes to eat jellyfish, such as the ocean sunfish.  These big fish can grow to be nearly 1,500 lbs eating nothing but jellyfish. Sea turtles also like to jellyfish, the loggerhead sea turtles are especially fond of the Portuguese man-of-war.  Jellyfish are even considered delicacies in countries such as China and Japan.  But perhaps the most interesting jellyfish predators are small blue sea slugs called Glaucus.  These little guys feed off jellyfish tentacles and can even take their stinging cells and use them to defend themselves.

Of course this is only a small portion of the things we know about jellyfish.  These creatures are some of the coolest in the world, and there's a lot to know about them. There are even some things that we don’t know, such as could jelly fish cure cancer?  But even so, for such simple creatures jelly fish are pretty interesting.