Jellyfish are fascinating creatures and there is a lot of interesting jellyfish facts. Did you for example know that jellyfish in some countries are considered delicatessens. One such country is Japan. This is the reason behind a growing international market for dried jellyfish. The jellyfish is dried to prevent them from spoiling. A jellyfish spoils in a matter of hours if it isn’t dried while I dried jellyfish can be stored for weeks. And that’s a jellyfish fact.
Another fascinating fact about jellyfish is that they don’t have any brain, heart, bones or eyes. Some jellyfish has ways of detecting obstacles that can be compared to sight but they don’t have real eyes. It is a mystery how they can process the information from their “sight” since they doesn’t have any brain. They react directly on food and danger stimuli via nerve impulses without having any brain to process the impulses. Another fact about jellyfish and their bodies is that the bodies are over 95% water.
Jellyfish uses tentacles with stinger cells to catch their food that consist of plankton and small fish. (Depends on the jellyfish size) The tentacles transport the food they killed with their stingers to their mouth before devouring it. It is the same stinger cells that stings humans.
Jellyfish goes through several stages during their lifecycle and the form that you usually associate with jellyfish, Medusas, is only one of them. There is also planula, jellyfish larvae. The planulae later attach themselves and become polyps which later turn to medusas.
A few other facts about jellyfish are:
Jellyfish fact: Jellyfish has been around for more than 650 million years which means that they outdate the dinosaurs and the sharks.
Jellyfish fact: Different species of jellyfish can be found in all the worlds’ ocean. Jellyfish can even be found in freshwater.
Jellyfish fact: A species of jellyfish, the
Box jellyfish (sea wasp) kills more people than any other marine creature.
Jellyfish fact: The worlds largest known jellyfish can reach a diameter of 2.5 m/ 8ft and their tentacles can grow to be half the length of a football field.
Jellyfish fact: Jellyfishes uses jet propulsion to make their way through to oceans of the world. Some jellyfish is avid swimmers while other mostly drifts with the currents.
Jellyfish fact: Some species of jellyfish contains a lot of protein and is thought to be able to play a large role in ending hunger and malnutrition in poor areas around the world.
Jellyfish fact: Jellyfish is able to reproduce both sexually and asexually during different parts of their life cycles.
These where just a few facts about jellyfish and there is a lot more to discover about these creatures and I recommend that you read a few of our other articles about jellyfish if you want to learn more. They are all filled with fascinating facts about jellyfish.
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