rare – moon jellyfish blog

The Helm Lab Blog

I live for moments like this. Things like this make the long nights editing grant proposals, the paper rejections, the failed experiments all worth it. To me, the best part of science is stuff like this: seeing something that completely takes my breath away. Even after studying animals like this for the last five years, this video has me in awe. The animal captured in this footage, simply put, is stunning:

This video was collected as part of the Nautilus Live expedition, a broadcast ocean exploration that anyone with internet access can be part of. The expedition is being headed by Dr. Robert Ballard, who famously discovered the wreck of the Titanic. But to me, the video above captures something much more rare and mysterious than any sunken ship.

This strange animal is a siphonophore, a relative of jellyfish. The most famous (infamous?) siphonophore is the portuguese man-of-war, but there are many species that live in the deep and are only seen on rare…

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The Helm Lab Blog

So, the flower hat jellyfish pretty much looks like someone painted it while tripping on acid. It doesn’t just have tentacles on the edges, no way man, its got a tentacle party going all up over its body. It doesn’t just have pink and purple colors, it’s got blue and orange and green all over too (did I mention it glows?) And it doesn’t just look trippy with its little highlighter fro, it acts weird too. Unlike most jellies, flower hats spend most of their day just chillin’ on plants or pebbles or whatever really, only interested in swimming around for munchies once the sun goes down. They’re found only around southern Japan, and aquarists pay a premium for a chance to put them on display. That’s because the weirdest part of the flower hat jelly is this: no one had ever seen a baby flower hat before, until now.

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