Talkin’ Smack: Understanding What Jellyfish Have to Say
I’ve spent the last decade learning to speak jellyfish. My daily routine consists of watching the sky and water. Some days, I would see school of salmon fry. Other days I might see a bald eagle soaring above or even a gray whale off in the distance, but the days I looked forward to were the days I saw jellyfish because they have a lot to say. Over the years, I’ve watched enough groups of jellyfish, called smacks, float by that I could tell what was going on in Puget Sound. I could tell how warm or cold the water was by what kinds of jellyfish I saw, or how strong the current was by how much they were pulsing. I could understand what jellyfish were saying. However, I am not going to claim to be fluent in smack talk. If UW offered a class series of classes called “smack talk: how to speak jellyfish” I’d only have just finished JLLY 101.
You’ve probably not thought a lot about jellyfish before now, and that’s okay! In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason you are reading this is because the idea of jellyfish speaking is something so crazy it can’t possibly be true. Fair, I’ll give you that much, the title is a tad clickbait-y, but jellyfish communicate what is going on in the waters that they live in, and scientists are just starting to learn their language. So, when I was contacted by Keister Lab in the UW Oceanography Department to help with their research aimed at understanding what impact jellyfish numbers have on Puget Sound’s food web, I was immediately onboard.
This is a big task. Jellyfish are notoriously difficult to study in labs because they are so fragile. This has led to major mistranslations by both scientists and the public about what they are saying. Articles with titles like “Jellyfish are Taking Over the World!” constantly fill my feed (talk about clickbait). No, they are not taking over the world. Instead, they are reacting to an environment our species is rapidly and constantly changing. The jellyfish lifecycle is controlled by water conditions such as temperature, which is influenced by climate change. If jellyfish reproduction is a light switch, the temperature is constantly crossing that threshold, switching it on and off, leading to what may seem as jellyfish taking over, but what they are really saying is “Hey, the water is feeling warm!”
But wait, jellyfish are awesome, why does it matter if jellyfish numbers increase? Well, Puget Sound is like trail mix, full of M&Ms, various nuts, and worst of all, raisins. The microscopic life, known as plankton, that makes up base of the food web are not all created equal, some are M&Ms, some are raisins. Everyone wants the M&Ms, from jellyfish, to herring, to salmon fry. But, if our impacts on the environment causes an increase in the number of jellyfish, does that mean they might eat all the good stuff and leave nothing but raisins for all the other important players like salmon? Maybe, maybe not, we aren’t fluent enough to understand quite yet.
How do we begin asking the jellyfish what their impact is on the Puget Sound food web? Well, you don’t learn to speak English from Shakespeare plays, you start with simple phrases like, “Hello! My name is Aurelia labiata, but you can call me a moon jellyfish.” Well, we just finished JLLY 101 and are starting JLLY 102, and we can start asking the simple questions. Questions like “Hey jellyfish, what do you eat, and how much?”
Bri Gabel is an experienced aquaculturist who managed a community science team for nearly a decade, focusing on rearing jellyfish for aquarium display and scientific research. For the last two years, her jellyfish have been used to help scientists understand what jellyfish are eating and how that might influence the entire Puget Sound food web.