In 1870, the world’s largest known jellyfish washed ashore in Massachusetts, an ectoplasmic beast eight feet across, with tentacles 120 feet long, and a scale-tipping weight of 330 pounds. (That would fill a lot of Smucker’s jars.) Surprisingly, despite its upper end bulk, the jellyfish hasn’t come to play the same kind of predatory specter in the imagination as giant squid. Maybe it’s the lack of brain. Or teeth. Nor has the jellyfish been cast with any spiritual allusions, despite it remarkable ghost-like appearance. How easy it is to see the oceans adrift with lost souls, which can control their motion up and down but are otherwise at the mercy of the currents. Jellyfish, it seems, are simply prosaic. Not quite jelly, not quite fish, they simply are.

But what they are is impressive. For a creature without a brain, jellyfish are environmentally opportunistic and pervasive, found in every ocean at almost every depth and in every kind of condition. The most dangerous live in the warm waters off northern Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and are known as the box jellyfish for their cubed shape. Chironex fleckeri, Carukia barnesi, and their brethren have killed 5,568 people since the 1950s, injecting their victims with poison through harpoon-shaped needles called sindasites, 500,000 of them on each tentacle. And here’s something that might fuel the imagination of the horror movie screenwriter–unlike its rounded relatives, the box jellyfish actively hunts and can swim up to 3.5 knots an hour.

This mesmerizing little video was shot at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta by Jon Rawlinson. Enjoy.

Via.

Equally mesmerizing is this video from a Japanese aquarium. And there must be something about the music of Barcelona–both filmmakers chose the moody Seattle band for their soundtracks.

Tagged as: ocean, oceans, water, wildlife