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by wxw 27 days ago
> The medusa, the free-swimming form most people picture when they hear the term jellyfish, is only one stage of the animal’s life cycle.

> We tend to think of the flower—or the jellyfish—as the organism, but these are actually reproductive units.

I'll never look at jellyfish the same.

3 comments

Same. Somehow "the jellyfish is basically the flower" is the detail that stuck with me more than the wound healing
Wait, so they’re sea jizz?!
My memories of being a 6-7 years old, throwing blue jellyfish on each other in "jelly wars" with other kids just suddenly turned into a traumatic memory instead.

Fun fact; where I grew up, we only had (at the time at least) two different types of jellyfish in the sea, blue and red ones. Easy to tell apart, one is "good", one is bad. However, now living in a very different place, suddenly what I learnt as a child is no longer right, there are tens of different species, some bad blue ones, some "less bad" red ones, and the easy "blue good, red bad" no longer works and it took a hard lesson to learn about this :)

Not, jellyfishes are the mother ship. More like sea pollen
I mean, all in all, most life forms are reproductive unit in some stage, or part of i, from the species point of view. Though some individual prove sterile.