Amazing Jellies - KQED QUEST

a KQED HD production [Music] some scientists estimate that they make up half of the mass of living things in the ocean their boneless brainless and most people would scream if they rubbed up against one but jellies are as elegant as they are squishy and they may hold the key to some of nature's most valuable mysteries researchers in the Monterey Bay area are discovering dozens of new species of jellies and uncovering things about the ones that are already familiar to us Chad Widmer is in charge of growing the jellies for one of the Monterey Bay Aquarium most popular exhibits which dazzles almost two million visitors each year it's hard to raise jellies in captivity because there are a lot of things that can go wrong they require daily care if you have a dirty tank and you're not very diligent about cleaning and getting rid of all of the following organisms they will all die Northeast Pacific sea nettles always swim against the current when I want to clean the windows of this tank I can't do that very well if all the jellies are swimming around all over the place so what I'll do is I'll turn off this valve which turns off the current and all of the jellies will sink to the bottom and then I can get in there and clean the windows and back wall other jelly's scientists have to actually go into the water to find their research subjects Steve haddock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing uses a remotely operated vehicle to study gelatinous animals in the depths of the bay he studies some jellyfish but mostly focuses on their obscure relatives he's even come up with his own name for jellyfish and their cousins the sort of technical term for that whole group of jelly-like organisms that you can find in the sea is gelatinous so plankton and I sort of felt like that was a bit of a mouthful and so I started calling him gelada in my in my own terminology that's right gelato no not the Italian ice cream though gelada communist many different flavors gelada first became popular with researchers in the mid-1800s biologists on long expeditions had time to hand collect delicate gelatinous animals they discovered fanciful animals related to jellyfish which they called siphonophores then in the 1930s marine researchers upscaled their operations with bigger faster ships fragile gelatinous animals essentially disappeared from their nets imagine pulling this cheese grater through the water from a mile deep and pulling up the animals while you're gonna get left are the Rayleigh's dirty ones that have hard body hard exoskeletons starting in the 1980s marine scientists used remotely operated vehicles known as ROV s to explore the ocean and rediscover gelatinous animals from the research vessels control room haddock manipulates the ROV to collect siphonophore specimens he estimates there are 80 species in Monterey Bay alone where they live largely out of human sight so i fine afford I think most people even ream biologists have probably never seen one maybe never really even heard of them very much it's a cousin of the jellyfish they're so bizarre the siphonophore in one sense could be described as a jellyfish that has been taken and stretched out and along that line grown out extra mouths and stomachs relocated its swimming Bell so that it's falling on both sides of that line some siphonophores have only two swimming bells to propel them forward others have many siphonophores carry their many tentacles mouths and stomachs around like a wide net that makes them very effective at catching small fish and crustaceans the longest siphonophores can grow to more than 100 feet in length this makes them the world's longest animals even though they're no wider than a broomstick though they live all around the world and at all depths the animals remain elusive because of their extreme fragility they're living in an environment where there are no boundaries there's no hard things really to bump up against unless it's a predator prey and so they're not really adapted to be robust and be able to bump into things case in point when haddock discovered this red siphonophore he realized that it's extremely sensitive to life we almost named it the exploding red siphonophore even in the distance as soon as we saw it with the ROV when the lights would reach it it would start to just pop off little parts would go swimming and so it sort of explode haddock learned to keep his distance and work fast clearly this animal wasn't going to make it to the aquarium where sturdiness is part of the job description to be on display animals need to be hardy enough for show and tell here is it jelly and I'm holding it by the Bell you see they have these four long frilly mouth arms it's kind of like having great big long frilly lips which then passes the food up to the mouth the mouth is located right in the middle of the jelly so here I'm sticking my finger right into the mouth of this jelly so they don't have a complete gut so they eat things it goes into the mouth goes into the gut things that aren't digested then just have to come right back out the mouth again so jellies aren't very polite dinner guests in his lab at the aquarium Widmer is growing 20 species of jellies found near the coast in Monterey Bay I only have 14 different windows so I only put the best looking jellies I have in my collection on display at any given time to keep his displays full Widmer makes sure his lab is always well stocked with jellies at the polyp stage after fertilization jelly larvae attached to hard surfaces and become pod like polyps these polyps in turn produce other polyps when temperature and food conditions are right each polyp produces multiple baby jellies which eventually pulse away today Widmer is moving babies of a species known as egg yolk jellies to the first of a series of bigger and bigger tanks as soon as some other jellies start going downhill I'll replace them with these egg yolk jellies probably about six to eight weeks these will be ready to go while Widmer is working to produce the most beautiful jellies possible steve haddock is trying to figure out what makes them so beautiful he's been identifying the genes that give some siphonophores fluorescent properties these animals can take one color of light for example blue light and turn it into another color in this case green light this is a siphonophore that we cut yesterday with the ROV it's sort of our lab rat that we use for a lot of our experiments the surface of that animal is covered with these little fluorescent spots that just sort of like this leopard spots almost researchers are just starting to figure out what jellies use fluorescence for haddock has found one species of siphonophore that flicks a red fluorescent lure near its stinging cells to attract fish and the mysteries of fluorescence are turning out to benefit humans as well as gelatinous animals a gene extracted from the crystal jelly has become so vital to the life sciences that the three scientists who discovered and developed the gene won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 scientists engineer the jellyfish gene into research animals so that parts of them glow green this allows them for example to follow the cells from the pancreas that are involved in diabetes in hopes of finding a cure despite their contributions to humanity jellies living outside aquariums have more often than not been cast as villains while they sting so that's one thing against them they can clog the Nets of fishermen can clog the intakes of public aquariums or battleships or power plants they have polyps that are growing along the shore and when the conditions are right all those pops are going to pop up little babies at the same time so automatically you you basically have a bloom that is going to occur hundreds and thousands of these same species of jellies some researchers have suggested that there might be a worldwide increase in jellies populations brought on in part by the warming of the ocean with marine havoc are skeptical we don't really have very good evidence whether or not jelly blooms are any worse than they have been through historical times at present people haven't done all of the science yet on all of the different species of jellies to say here are the effects of climate change on this jelly at this point in its life history we haven't got there yet the one thing that I would disagree with is that if we warm up the ocean it's going to automatically make it a better place for jellyfish a nun help the ocean is going to be unhealthy for jellyfish too [Music] fragile and mysterious gelatinous animals are slowly revealing more of their secrets to researchers the Monterey Bay Aquarium aims to put a siphonophore on display in the near future and who knows perhaps one day siphonophores will be as famous as the aquarium sea nettles

Channel: KQED

Views: 847,972

Rating: 4.7535772 out of 5

Keywords: jelly, jellies, jellyfish, siphonophore, gelata, gelatinous, ctenophore, jelly fish, invertebrates, aquarium, ROV, Monterey Bay, MBARI, Monterey Bay Aquarium, lure, bioluminescence, gfp

Id: pimIbTqJLZc

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/TinyTownFamily]

When they showed that giant tank I thought:

“Admiral, there be whales here!”