Jellyfish

“ The most remarkable of these processes of reproduction is that which is represented by the jellyfishes so abundant in all seas, and so beautiful either when seen floating along just at the surface of the summer sea, or when at night they glow with phosphorescence like silvery, greenish rockets in the dark waves. Sometimes they occur in enormous "schools"—as we say of fish—all of one kind, filling the water thickly as far as one can see, and now and then in late summer are cast on the beach in long windrows. ”

“ Near the shore in shallow waters, tiny sponges and mussels cling to rocks and pilings, jellyfish pulse their way in search of food, starfish sometimes grow to unusual size, and sea anemones open and close at the slightest prod. ”

“ Some jellyfishes are so poisonous that they are most dangerous even to man. Only one of these, however, is found in the North Atlantic, almost all the jellyfishes that one finds lying about on the beach being perfectly harmless. But if, when you are bathing, you see a yellowish-brown jellyfish about as big as a soup-plate swimming near you in the water, be sure to get out of its way as fast as you possibly can; for if its threads should touch any part of your body, you are almost sure to be very badly stung. ”

“ This is called by zoologists, alternation of generations. A complete individual is the life from the germination of one egg to the production of another. So that an “individual” consists of a hydroid colony fixed in one place together with all the jellyfish produced from its buds, which may now be floating miles away from it in the ocean. Bathers in the surf are sometimes touched and stung by the long, streamer-like tentacles of the jellyfish. These, like the tentacles of the hydra, have nettling cells (Fig. 41) . ”

“ On the flat sandbank they found at least a dozen large jellyfish, left stranded by the tide. Aldred insisted upon picking up some of these and restoring them to their native element; and she kept poking about in so many heaps of seaweed, and investigating such a number of species, that the other girls began to despair of ever getting her back to Birkwood.
"We shall be all in the dark if we don't mind!" remonstrated Phœbe. ”

“ Nobody expects much of a jellyfish. Its soft, pulpy substance is incapable of anything but the simplest movement, and no animal that has not something hard to steady it can greatly excel the jellyfish. ”

“ Apart from the skeleton, therefore, the tissues of the body-wall of the Starfish do not exhibit much advance on those of a Jellyfish. If anything is to be compared to the blood system of the higher animals it must be these meshes in the connective tissue. From observations made on other Echinoderms it appears probable that the colour of the skin is due to amoebocytes loaded with pigment wandering outwards through the jelly of the body-wall and disintegrating there. ”

“ They move; so does the jellyfish move. They move in order to eat in order that they may keep moving. There you have it. They live for their belly's sake, and the belly is for their sake. It's a circle ”

“ You see, they can see perfectly through the ink, but the other fishes can’t and so when they dive down again and again and try to catch the inkfishes, they can’t do it. The water is so black they can’t see anything and they flounder off into the clear water, while the inkfishes keep out of their way.
“The jellyfishes and inkfishes are great friends and often visit each other. Little Kitty Inkfish and Nelly Jellyfish were especially good friends, and one day Kitty Inkfish asked her mother if she could invite Nelly Jellyfish to visit her for a whole week. ”

“ James Stalker, 'I remember hearing a celebrated naturalist describe a species of jellyfish, which, he said, lives fixed to a rock from which it never stirs. It does not require to go in search of food, because 187 in the decayed tissues of its own organism there grows a kind of seaweed on which it subsists. ”

“ Other zoophytes swarming near the sponges consisted chiefly of a very elegant species of jellyfish; mollusks were represented by varieties of squid that, according to Professor Orbigny, are unique to the Red Sea ”

“ Pale green in life Light tan or white when dried on beach Crumbles easily
Only the most searching eye will discover this sponge, because it so closely resembles a dull uninteresting rock or pile of bread crumbs. When it has been freshly broken, it has a vile odor—a good clue to identification.
The Jelly-like Animals
White Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) Flattened body Under 10′′ in diameter
The tentacles dangling down from the underside of this jellyfish are covered with tiny stinging cells, which in this species do not penetrate human skin. ”

“ Nothing can be prettier than the smaller kinds of jellyfishes. Their structure is so delicate, yet so clearly defined, their color so soft, yet often so brilliant, their texture so transparent, that you seek in vain among terrestrial forms for terms of comparison, and are tempted to say that nature has done her finest work in the sea rather than on land. Sometimes hundreds of these smaller medusae might be seen floating together in the deep glass bowls, or jars, or larger vessels with which Agassiz's laboratory at Nahant was furnished. ”

“ Jellyfishes feed on all sorts of tiny creatures—the fry of fishes, and the zoeas of shrimps and prawns, for instance—and if you were to see one of these swim up against those terrible threads, you would notice that it at once became paralysed, and that in a very few moments it would be dead. The fact is that all the way along these threads are set with hundreds and hundreds of tiny oval cells, each of which has a very slender dart, with a barbed tip, coiled up like a watch-spring inside it. ”

“ Many of the zoophytes spend part of their life in an active free-swimming condition before settling down, becoming attached and thereafter [Pg 93] remaining fixed. In localities near the seashore many animals belonging to this great group can be readily found and observed. The beautiful sea-anemones with their slowly-waving tentacles, the fine many-branched truly plant-like hydroids with their hosts of little buds, and the soft colorless masses of jelly, the jellyfishes, which are cast up on to the beaches by the waves are all animals belonging to the branch Cœlenterata. ”

“ Jellyfishes are among the very oddest creatures which are found in the sea; for their bodies are made up almost entirely of sea-water! It is quite true, of course, that if you cut them in two the water does not run away. ”

“ Jellyfishes can swim through the water by spreading and contracting their umbrella-shaped bodies, and you may sometimes see them travelling about in such enormous numbers that the water is perfectly thick with them. ”

“ The mouth of most jelly-fishes is beneath, in the center of the bell, and is surrounded by tentacles which procure food. These are also furnished with stinging cells by which the food is killed. Their modes of reproduction are curious. In some a portion of the body of the parent begins to grow out, and this continues until a perfect bud-like protuberance is the result, and then the bud drops off and, after various interesting changes, becomes a fully formed jelly-fish. Sometimes the parent begins to divide, and actually splits into two parts, each of which becomes a perfect animal. ”

“ This hydroid has no buds or branches, but the main tube of the body divides itself into a number of rings or plates, until the whole animal looks somewhat like a pile of tiny saucers with scalloped edges. Finally the upper plate begins to twist and squirm until it loosens itself from the pile, and floats off to lead the gay and independent life of a jelly-fish. It is followed by the other plates in their turn, each making a separate animal. These new jelly-fish eat greedily and grow fast, forming some of our largest varieties. ”

“ When jelly-fish are seen lying in shapeless masses upon the beach, where they have been washed by the tide, their appearance is not attractive. If, however, we can watch them from the side of a boat, or from a long pier, as they dart through the water with their tentacles trailing after them, we shall soon learn to admire their graceful movements and their elegant colors. There is something very interesting too in these little inhabitants of the great deep. ”

“ There have even been found "fixed jelly-fish" (Fig. 5) —those so fond of a settled resting-place that they have put out suckers by which they attach themselves permanently to some rock or stone.
Although jelly-fish are so brilliant in the daytime, they have a different beauty at night, when they throw out a golden light slightly tinged with green, resembling the light of a glow-worm. Vast numbers of small animals in the sea have this power of throwing out light from their bodies. ”

“ In any large Jelly-fish you can see marks which run from the centre of the body, and another mark round the edge of the "umbrella." These are really tubes. They all join with a hollow space inside the body, which is the creature's stomach. The mouth-tube opens under the body, as can be seen by turning the Jelly-fish on its back, and moving the lobes of jelly aside. All the food goes up this tube-mouth, and so into the stomach of the animal. The whole creature is little more than so many cells of sea-water, the walls of the cells being a very thin, transparent kind of skin. ”

“ The life of the jelly-fish is very short, and simply serves to multiply the species, and to scatter the eggs far and wide along the shore of the ocean, and thus to secure the wide distribution of the hydroids. The egg hatches, however, neither into a jelly-fish like the parent, nor into a hydra, but into a minute microscopic animal of extremely simple structure, which is known as a planula. Fig. 2, a, which is a highly magnified drawing of the planula of another species, will serve to show what it is like. ”

“ On fine summer nights, a soft, tender light plays round the boat as it moves onward, and the oars drop liquid fire. For how much of beauty are we indebted to these living specks of jelly?
Of the extreme minuteness of some of the species, an idea may be formed from the fact, that 110,000 might be contained in a cubic foot of water. We can say nothing with certainty as to the cause of the phosphorescence of the medusæ, and shall not trouble our readers with mere speculations.
The jelly-fishes furnish us with a striking illustration of the profusion of life in the ocean. ”

“ This they can do easily, because the jelly-fish has no jacket of shell or bone like the lobster, nor any skin like a fish, and so always has to swim naked, exposed to all kinds of danger. Sometimes great jelly-fishes, two or three feet in diameter, sail gaily along near the shore, as proud as the long-handled-umbrella of a daimiō, and as brilliantly colored as a Japanese parasol. Floating all around their bodies, like the streamers of a temple festival, or a court lady's ribbons, are their long tentacles or feelers. ”

“ Fish, crabs, shell-fish, are caught and eaten by jelly-fish.
The Jelly-fish.
There is something in the jelly-fish which can dissolve these hard things. He often casts out from his mouth-sac the harder and larger shells and bones. He does this as you would put from your mouth nutshells or plum-stones.
How do the jelly-fish move in the water? They have no swimming-feet as Mr. Crab has. They have no fins, as the fish has. Some of them move by spreading out the bell, or round part, of their [Pg 134] bodies, and then drawing it up again. ”

“ You see the hydroid does not in the least resemble a jelly-fish. Perhaps the strangest thing about these wonderful lumps of animated jelly is that their young are not jelly-fishes at all, but an entirely different sort of animals. Sometimes they take the shape of a pile of platters, which finally separate and become individual jelly-fish; sometimes they grow into living plants which bear eggs like fruit, which eggs hatch and finally become jelly-fish. ”

“ In the days of old, the jelly-fish was one of the retainers in waiting upon the Queen of the World under the Sea, at her palace in Riu Gu. In those days he had a shell, and as his head was hard, no one dared to insult him, or stick him with their horns, or pinch him with their claws, or scratch him with their nails, or brush rudely by him with their fins. In short, this fish instead of being a lump of jelly, as white and helpless as a pudding, as we see him now, was a lordly fellow that could get his back up and keep it high when he wished to. ”

“ The movements of this jelly-fish are languid, and it sometimes remains perfectly quiet in the bright sunshine for hours, not even moving its tentacles.
Fig. 5.—Fixed Jelly-Fish.
You have probably noticed a great difference in the movements of people. So with jelly-fish: some are much more active and energetic than others. While some kinds appear to delight in darting through the water, until one might suppose from their frisky motions that they are having a great deal of fun and frolic, others prefer to make no exertion, and to drift idly with the waves. ”

“ Jelly-fish, too, abound on the East Coast. They come aboard in the nets, staring with black beady eyes from out the shapeless masses of their bodies, looking in the pale moonlight like the faces of lost souls, showing on the surface of the bottomless pit, casting despairing arms around their heads in impotent agony. The water which has sluiced over their slimy bodies is charged with irritating properties, such as drive a man to tear the very flesh from his bones in a fruitless attempt to allay the horrible itching. ”

“ Though the jelly-fish is in constant motion—in perpetual motion, so to speak, for it never rests, that ever we could discover, either by night or day—its progress in the sea is rather due to the set of the wind and the tide-drift than its own exertions, its incessant labours of contraction and expansion being performed not so much for the purpose of shifting its place in the water, as for the purpose of grasping and sucking in at each contraction such microscopic organisms as form its food. ”