Meet the Upside Down Jellyfish. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that it…. well spends it’s life living upside down. Why? Does it offer better ocean views? To confuse predators? To get a constant head rush?
Nope. It’s to catch the suns rays. Not in a sunseeker, I need to get a killer tan for summer kind of way, but something far more practical… to eat
What? Aren’t jellyfish predators? Most are, except this little blob. It likes to make its own rules especially when it comes to food. While it has a net of tentacles fashioned with harpoons to capture prey, these tentacles are also filled with zoozanthallae, a special type of algae which captures sunlight and converts it to food! Like land plants and corals.
So to maximise the amount of sun exposure, it swims upside down revealing the tentacles to the sun. Impressive stuff for an animal that is over 97% water with a little thickener added. What is really cool is that these jellies aren’t born with the zoozanthallae, they pick them up as they’re floating along in the water.
So what is the benefit of two feeding modes and which one results in the most amount of food or calories for the jellyfish? Capturing prey using the nematocysts in the tentacles or the capturing of light for food or a combination of both?
To answer that question we decided to geek it up, throw on our lab coats and thick crazy scientist glasses and undertaken few experiments which included jellyfish:
1. In the dark with no food;
2. In the dark with food;
3. In the sun with no food; and
4. In the sun with food.
So what were the results? We’re not going to tell you. You’ll have to watch the video (mean aren’t we?)
