Watch: How on earth did jellyfish survive when even the mighty dinosaurs went extinct?
They'll probably outlive mankind as well. Be like a jellyfish.
Jellyfish are a lot more powerful than most of us think. And they’re rather eclectic, to say the least.
While some are really tiny, others are longer than a blue whale. One species secretes an incredibly lethal venom, while another holds the secrets to some of most important breakthroughs in biology.
Half a billion years is a long time to be around. They’ve managed to outlive dinosaurs by hundreds of millions of years, and are showing no signs of slowing down. These soft-bodied creatures are structurally pretty simple, with a translucent bell made of a delicate material and a neural net around the bell’s inner margin.
(Maybe the fact that they have no brain or spinal cord protects them from existentialist crises.)
They consume small sea creatures through a hole in the underside of those bells. Really.
These jellyfish have amazing abilities, though. One kind of box jellyfish has a staggering number of eyes – 24, to be precise.
The sting is one of its most infamous weapons. It’s deadly too. One variety of box jellyfish has enough venom to kill a person in under five minutes. When its coiled cells (which are like poisonous harpoons) are triggered by contact, the poison enters the attacker. And the pressure exerted to inject venom into the victim is over 550 times the pressure of Mike Tyson’s most powerful punch.
Scientists have realised that jellyfish have successfully roughed it out for over 500 million years. The may even go back over 700 million years. Acidic oceans aren’t stopping them. What’s more, some can lay as many as 45,000 eggs in one night.
There’s also the immortal jellyfish, of course, whose cells changing their identity when under attack or faced with ageing. New clones of the parent cells emerge, making them the only animals we know of that have managed to combat mortality.