“And today we’re talking about a tiny little long-lived sea booger. But more on that later. The long lived stuff. Not the booger stuff.”
Description
- Like many sea creatures, the jellyfish is found all over the world’s oceans.
- They prefer temperate to tropical regions.
- They are believed to have originated in the pacific but may have traveled all over the ocean in ballast water.
- Ballast water is water that’s used to fill tanks in the hulls of ships to maintain balance, especially in high winds.
- Tanks fill at one port and discharge at the second port.
- Sometimes, animals find themselves in ballast water to be deposited somewhere else in the ocean.
- The jellyfish is a bell shape and transparent except for their orange or red center bits.
- It has short tentacles that range from 8 to 90
Measure Up
Diameter
- maximum diameter of about 4.5 millimetres (0.18 in)
- How many jellyfish go into the diameter of a baseball?
- Hint: In the early days of baseball, the balls were made horse hide with a string-wrapped rubber core. There was no size standardization, so balls could be anywhere between the size of a golf ball and a soft ball.
- Answer: 17 jellyfish; baseballs are 76 mm in diameter
80–90 tentacles
- 90 tentacles.
- How many of the number of calories in 19 concord grapes go into the number of tentacles a jelly has.
- Hint: A concord grape is actually a type of grape that are used to make table grapes, juice, wine, and Jelly.
- Answer: 3, there are 30 calories in 19 grapes!
Though most of the species are genetically identical, they have come up with different physical adaptations depending on their environments. For instance, specimens that live in tropical waters have 8 tentacles while ones from more temperate regions have 24 tentacles.