Jellyfish Theater

In the vast ocean, without walls and far from the floor, jellyfish can become drifting islands of activity. Creatures from far and wide will congregate on them to act out the ups and downs of life and death. Jellyfish have symbiotic relationships with living things of all sizes, from fish and shrimp that feed off them or off the pieces of food left between their tentacles, to single-celled photosynthesizing organisms that take shelter inside the cytoplasm of the jellyfish's cells.

In this video, Trisha Towanda talks about one particular jellyfish, the fried egg jelly, and some of the other creatures that hang around it. There are moon jellies that the fried egg jelly eats. These moon jellies have little parasitic crustaceans on them called amphipods, which jump to the fried egg jelly while the moon jelly is being eaten. There are also crabs that ride around on the fried egg jelly, that are parasitic in their youth but then grow to be helpful symbionts by eating off the little amphipods. This sort of coming-of-age story where a symbiont's relationship changes over its lifespan is an unusual one. Trisha put the pieces together by staring at them for hours and days and weeks when she was in Erik Thuessen's Lab at Evergreen State College.

Many thanks to Trisha Towanda, who is now stationed in the Seibel Lab at the University of Rhode Island. This video was edited and animated by Sophia Tintori, with an original score by local pop hero Amil Byleckie. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Here is the paper Trisha wrote about the story.

--Sophia Tintori