World Jellyfish Day

Representatives of gelatinous zooplankton are more ancient animals than dinosaurs Jellyfish lived on Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first man appeared on the planet Unique invertebrate animals, consisting of 95-98% water, have a transparent gelatinous body shaped like a bell, disk or umbrella The movement of jellyfish under water occurs through muscle contraction Despite the lack of a brain, these predators, having 24 pairs of eyes and 2 nervous systems, successfully hunt and avoid collisions with natural enemies November 3 is World Jellyfish Day To protect themselves from aggressors, unusual invertebrate animals use stinging tentacles Through them, jellyfish inject poison into their prey - fish and their eggs, crustaceans, small plankton, squid, which are used as food The color of some members of Polypomedusae meduza depends on their diet: they turn pink or purple from eating crustacean larvae The natural enemies of the most ancient inhabitants of our planet are sea turtles, tuna, salmon, sunfish, sharks and some birds They threaten the number of jellyfish living in the waters of the World Ocean World Jellyfish Day is intended to draw attention to this problem World Jellyfish Day was founded by marine biologists and with the aim of spreading knowledge about amazing representatives of the fauna, whose name in English translates as “jelly fish” The diameter of the largest of them reaches 25 m, length - 30-37 m, and weight - 200 kg The tentacles of one of these giants, the nomura jellyfish, which lives in the water column of the Yellow and East China Seas, produce a strong poison for which there is no antidote The smallest of the population, the Pacific Irukandji, has a body with a diameter of 5 mm to 25 cm Despite its tiny size, this species of jellyfish, which lives off the coast of Australia, is very poisonous The transparent body that lungless animals breathe with helps them remain undetected in the water Therefore, people get skin burns when coming into contact with jellyfish Sea creatures are no less dangerous for various human-built mechanisms, such as nuclear reactors Jellyfish caught in seawater filters have repeatedly stopped the operation of Japanese, Swedish and American nuclear power plants However, animals also benefit nature and people by purifying water from small organic debris The Chinese and representatives of other Asian peoples eat jellyfish of the order Rhizostomae, the species Stomolophus meleagris and Catostylus mosaicus In Russia, in the Black, Azov, Baltic, White, Barents and Japanese seas, many species of these beautiful creatures live Observing them gives people not only pleasure, but also real benefit Thus, the cornerot jellyfish, or alicon, living in the Black Sea, predicts weather disasters: before a storm, it moves from shallow water to depth Scientists are attracted by the superpowers of some representatives of Polypomedusae meduza The Mediterranean Sea is home to the species Turritopsis dohrnii, the so-called immortal jellyfish When injured or the body ages, it is able to turn back time, returning to the polyp stage, living its life cycle over and over again until it is eaten by a predator Even with numerous degenerations of the body, the young individual remains an absolute exact copy of the old one - its genetic clone Observations of mysterious representatives of marine fauna bring scientists closer to revealing the secret of not only immortality, but the adaptive characteristics of living organisms Thus, more than 2 thousand jellyfish larvae were sent into space in 1991 in vessels with sea water To the surprise of biologists, they withstood weightlessness well and hatched, turning into mature individuals that gave birth to numerous offspring People will learn about these and other features of the most ancient, but still little studied inhabitants of the Earth during the celebration of World Jellyfish Day