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Everything But The Shark Week: Jellyfish, Immortal and Astounding

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Your feelings about jellyfish might be classified as “it’s complicated.”

If you have been stung by one, you might call jellyfish frightening and even painful. If you have watched them gliding through the water, in person or films like Finding Nemo, you might label them tranquil and meditative. If you truly know jellyfish, you’d most certainly call them what they are: amazing, astonishing, and (sometimes!) immortal.

Flop aside Shark Week lovers, grab your flippers while we “dive deeper,” and explore these cool jellyfish facts found in the pages of books in Falvey’s collection!


Did you know Jellyfish…

…have no heart, brain, bones, or eyes, and their bodies are mostly water?

…travel and migrate in groups called a smack?

…have bodies, called bells, that are shaped like open umbrellas?

…either swim by floating with the current or squeezing water through their bodies?

…can sometimes revert from the adult (medusa) stage to the polyp stage and back again, effectively becoming immortal?

… come in a variety of sizes, including the largest, the lion’s mane jellyfish, whose bell can be as large as eight feet wide and can possess tentacles up to 100 feet long?

Reading Recommendations for Jelly-fans…

The above facts were drawn from several books available in the Library’s collection:

Bonus podcasts with even more jelly-facts!

Want to read some great jelly-fiction and jelly-poetry?

Keep checking back all week on the blog, where we will be exploring many other incredible creatures of the sea!

Shawn Proctor Head shotShawn Proctor, MFA, is Communications and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library. He was stung by a jellyfish as a child and, naturally, is writing a horror novel about jellyfish now.

 


 


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Last Modified: July 12, 2021

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