 Hi, welcome to the library. I'm Lynn Brockington, Community Experience Coordinator at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. Our webinar today is part of the public education program of the Lighthouse Park Preservation Society. Over the years, the society has brought many educational talks to the library and we are grateful they've continued to do this online. This afternoon, our presenter is Jessica Schaub. Jessica is a graduate student at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC. Jessica studies jellyfish, the ones which live in the waters off our coast. And today she's going to share what she's been learning about the diets of these jellyfish and their position in coastal food webs. So I'll just ask Jessica to come online now. Hi, Jessica. Hi, Lynn. Hi. Good. Great to see you. Thank you so much for coming. It's really exciting. I'm an ocean swimmer. I love to go for a swim in the ocean and often see jellyfish, but I really don't know very much about them. So I'm really excited to hear about what you're going to tell us. So I will just mention to everyone that if you do have questions, Jessica will answer them at the end. So please put them in the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. I'll just shut off my video now and I'll let you get at it. Great. Okay. Thank you, Lynn. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining me this Saturday afternoon. That was a great intro by Lynn. I am a master's student in oceanography at the University of British Columbia. I'm a jellyfish ecologist by trade, which means I study how jellyfish interact with their environment. Most of my field work is in British Columbia. So the examples that I'll be giving today are with a very local focus. I will just say that I'm tuning in from Nelson today, so I apologize if the internet connection is a bit slow or a little bit choppy. If there's a significant issue, I'm happy to back up and cover something again. So this talk is geared for the public. So it will go over very basic concepts of jellyfish biology and jellyfish ecology. That being said, if you do have more complicated questions or things you want discussed further, please put them in the chat and we can talk about them at the end during the Q&A session. So it's a bit strange to be doing webinars online because I can't really see everybody's faces. So I'm going to try something new today. If you have your cell phone near you, there is an application called Swift polling. Actually, maybe I'll just explain it first. So Swift polling takes texts that are sent to a to a cell phone number and then creates a word cloud out of that. And so we can see what the results are kind of live. I'm going to try it out. So a word cloud just words that show up more often are going to be bigger. So we're just going to see how this works. So if you can grab your cell phones and I'm going to take a minute and just switch to a different screen here. While everyone grabs their phones and pull up both screens side by side so everybody can see the question and the polling at the same time. Okay. So I hope everybody can see this. And I'm assuming that you can see my clicker, but if that's not the case, then let me know. Yes, the question that we're going to be answering is where are you joining from. So this is a bit of a warm up because we'll talk about something else afterwards. So just text. I'll start the polling now. Text the answer to the cell phone number. Yeah, perfect. Okay. Well, I'm glad it's working. Yeah, so again, it's a busy number. So if you I don't know if it will charge your phone to text out of country or something if that's the case for anybody. I'm happy to see that it's a lot of busy people. So hopefully some of the examples I could say will be relevant to some people. So I actually grew up in Northern Alberta. So I guess I have some family or friends on here today. Yes, that's good from West Van. Okay, so if you don't get a chance to put it in this poll, we will be doing a different one. So if you're still getting set up. Oh, Ontario. Great. Thanks for answering. I'm just going to stop this one. And then reset it. And then we're going to answer another question. Okay, so the next question I am interested in is what people, sorry, we'll start to poll now. And then what people already know about jellyfish. So what are the words that come to mind when you think of a jellyfish. I don't know if people will be influenced by the answers that they get on the screen. You can, yeah, feel free to share more than one text if you want. Oh gorgeous. I like that. I think so too. If you don't know anything about jellyfish, it's also fine to just type the word nothing. Stings. Yes, that's a very common answer. So I am a gallery educator at the Vancouver Aquarium and I spend a lot of my time talking about jellyfish to the public and I will say that the answers that come up most often are that people either don't know anything about jellyfish, or they know that they sting so that's Yeah, it's good to see that there's a mix of answers in here. I'm going to stop that now and then move on. So, yeah, that gave me a good idea. Of what people do know. I hope that this is reset properly. So I'm going to start with some just background and some basic biology of jellyfish that we can follow along when I start using the words for the rest of the presentation. This is a picture of a pretty typical jellyfish so this is what people tend to think of when they think of jellyfish. I'm going through some of the anatomy right now so along the outside right here there are these tentacles they're the true tentacles. So these long stringy orange tentacles are packed with stinging cells and this is where you'll find like the biggest sting so if there was a part of the jellyfish to stay away from, stay away from the tentacles. Another kind of tentacle that jellyfish have they're called oral arms so all of this frilly stuff on the inside. This is mostly for feeding so oral arms, their purpose is to increase surface area so there's like a maximum amount of contact. So they come across anything that they would like to eat. They have the highest chance of capturing it. And so once they collect food either on their outer tentacles or on the oral arms the food is moved up and up and up towards the bell so if you were to move all of these tentacles out of the way right in the middle kind of like an octopus, you would find a mouth. So jellyfish have a single opening to their stomach. We call it a mouth but it also serves as an anus because they don't have a second hole to egest the waste from. So that's a fun fact. And the mouth leads to this squishy part on top called the bell. And then they have a stomach inside of there it's just an open pouch. It's very similar to our stomach. They take in food, the waste so it's very similar to what happens in humans. I will say that if you were ever inclined to touch a jellyfish I would start with the bell because there are no stinging cells on the bell. Jellyfish also don't have a brain so this is something that people tend to hear quite often because it's an interesting fact. So the way it works they do have nerves and they do feel they can sense their environment a little bit. But without a brain they don't have a processing system so the analogy I like to use is that jellyfish can bump into something and then they will move away from it. But there's no central they don't think like oh I bumped into something I should move away they just react to things that happen. So they do not have a brain, but they do kind of have we call them primitive eyes so right in these areas where the tentacles reach the bell. There's pockets in there with light receptors so they can tell kind of what direction the light is in so basically just sends the shadows, but we call them very primitive eyes. So that's fun and interesting. So this is basic jellyfish biology and it applies to many of jellyfish so although jellyfish can look differently the same principles tend to apply. So these are some like wacky examples of what some jellyfish look like this is a flower hat jellyfish they keep their tentacles sometimes tucked up on top of their bell. They also have these fluorescent tips so this yellow color that you see under the pink tip. If there's fluorescent light around they tend to glow very brightly which is fun if you want to look up a video of that later it's kind of nice. This is a deep sea jellyfish that they discovered maybe a few years ago. This is not a cartoon this is a photo from an image sorry from a video that was taken by an ROV like a deep sea ROV. So this is what it looks like in real life. This is an Arctic jellyfish has lots of stomach folds so makes it look really interesting. Helmet jelly. This is another deep sea jellyfish but it looks kind of interesting. But you can see that they all basically have tentacles they have a bell they have a stomach in there for processing their food. And so we'll move on to some more local examples these are BC jellyfish. This top one here is a lion's mane jellyfish. This is one of the biggest species of jellyfish in the world. Their tentacles can be as long as a whale so you could be stung by something that you can't even see which is sometimes horrifying to people. They're very beautiful they're this deep red color usually. You're quite lucky if you if you get to see one in person. This is a crystal jellyfish it's also found in BC for those of you that are like microbiologists or even general biologists. This is the jellyfish that the green fluorescent protein that they used to stain cells was derived from so the person that discovered this actually won a Nobel Prize in biology so these jellyfish are found in British Columbia. These are small but they're quite common a fried egg jellyfish so they are called this because they look like an egg. I'm not sure if you can see it but yeah these ones are quite big as well. So out of the I don't know maybe 2000 species of jellyfish in the world 110 of them are found in Canada and BC has 75 species so there are so many species of jellyfish in British Columbia. Most of them are quite small most of them don't have a powerful sting. But if you have spent any time on the water around BC chances are you have seen the moon jellyfish so this is the dominant jellyfish species that is in British Columbia. This is the species that I focus a lot for my research. They're characterized by this flower shape inside their bell. They have the same profiles they have these four alarms that you can see these little like with the strings here. The tentacles are hard to see because they're kind of really fine like hair but down here you can see they have tentacles around the outside. And I'm also lucky to study these the species because they don't have a very powerful sting. So. Yeah, easy to touch. They're beautiful to look at. Yeah so this is what I'll be using for most of the examples for the rest of the talk. I will also go over so jellyfish life history. So when people think of jellyfish they think of like that picture I showed at the beginning or they think of this stage so the stage that swims around in the water, their tentacles point down and they just kind of bob around. It's called the Medusa stage and the reason that I'm talking about one kind of stages because there's actually two stages to jellyfish. So the Medusa stage can be either male or female, and they reproduce by a sexual reproduction so their gametes combined to form this planula larva stage, which is kind of like a very small fuzzy tic tac that swims around in the water column. And once it finds a good substrate to settle on it settles and becomes this pollock so the pollock is the second phase or morph of the jellyfish. It's actually the permanent morph of the jellyfish so pollocks can live for many years and they create these colonies so the larvae tend to settle together. So pollock colonies can stay viable for many years. And the, yeah, so the only purpose of the Medusa stage is really to create these pollocks so I would argue that the pollock is the permanent phase of the jellyfish and the one that you should think of when you think of jellyfish. And then the cycle continues by a process known as strobelation where the pollock divides and divides and divides and creates these stacks of they kind of look like flowers. And the one at the end is the oldest, and once it gets old enough it'll start to kind of pulse and then it'll pop off and become an ephira which is like a very tiny baby jellyfish, and that grows into a full grown Medusa. So let's see here. Medusa are seasonal so they tend to this process of strobelation tends to happen once a year. It happens all at once. And the jellyfish spend a few months growing from ephira to Medusa so they have this huge growth that happens over a quite a small window. And then after they release their larvae, most of them die off. So basically the purpose of the Medusa stage is just to create more polyps. Polyp colonies also have ways that they can increase their size. So there's two ways they do this. One is through budding. So they kind of grow another polyp off the side of them. And then once it gets big enough, it pops off and just becomes another solitary polyp. Or they create these podocysts which are like little polyp seeds basically. When the conditions are really poor in the water, like if the temperature is bad or I don't know, there's low nutrients or something is happening, they can kind of hibernate in these podocysts and once the conditions get better, then they grow into polyps again. So the name of the game in jellyfish biology is to like reproduce in these massive numbers. So Medusa can create maybe one can hold maybe a thousand plantula larvae, most of which will settle and each become a polyp. And then polyps can increase their colony size. And then each polyp can create maybe like up to 10 ephirae. And so this secular reproduction that happens all at once once a year results in these huge outbreaks of Medusa, which we call jellyfish blooms. So this is something that you've probably heard about in the media because it gets a lot of media attention when jellyfish are all concentrated together in one big group of bloom. There's a lot of negative interactions that happen, especially with humans. And so they do get some media attention. I will emphasize that jellyfish have been in the ecosystem for 65 million years for a very long time anyways. And so they do have a, like a purpose they have a role in the ecosystem. So everything related to them is not just negative. They do have positive things that are associated with them as well. So for this little next portion of the talk, I'm going to focus on the Medusa stage, but we will come back to the polyp. So don't forget about it. So this is an example of a jellyfish bloom. A group of jellyfish is also called a smack. So maybe you've heard of that. Maybe you haven't. It's a fun word. So I will use that sometimes. Yeah, as I said before, jellyfish blooms, they, it's like a huge number of jellyfish that are all concentrated in one area. And so we're interested in them because they can have really intense effects in a very localized area. So the environment within a jellyfish bloom can be quite different from the environment outside of a jellyfish bloom. They can create these little like micro environments. So when I was an undergraduate student, I was lucky to travel up to Calvert Island along the coast. So this is Vancouver down here. And at the north end of the island, the Hakai Research Institute has a research station on Calvert Island. And they have a drone team up there that does drone work for their, the different institutes that come through. So our project that we were working on was using drones to measure and map jellyfish blooms. So this is an example of a moon jellyfish bloom near Calvert Island. Each of those little white dots is a jellyfish. There's a boat here on this side for scale. And there's some trees on the shoreline here for scale as well. So it gives you an idea of really how big this bloom actually was. Yes, and so this is a close-up photo of the bloom. I like this one because you can see the reflection of the drone in the photo right here. And each of these moon jellyfish are about the size of a dinner plate. So you can imagine how many jellyfish this really is in this little patch right here. From the work that we did by combining like nettoes and images of the bloom, we estimated that if you were to scoop all of this out of the water and weigh it, it would be about 117 tons of jellyfish. So it's quite a few. This is some video footage from, this was another technique that we were kind of playing with instead of hauling jellyfish out of the water. We thought maybe we could measure them with video profiles. So this is a one meter by one meter square and my dive watch is attached just for a depth gauge. And of course it's not a perfect method, but this just gives you like a cool view of what it looks like inside a bloom of jellyfish. If any of you are scuba divers, but yeah, this is like a fall time of year. So the water quality was getting better. It was later than summer, but not quite winter quality yet. And we hit the bottom and then it just comes back up. So I'll skip over the second half of this. But there is another example, like a video example that I have and this is a mantra and jellyfish research is that jellyfish are notoriously difficult to deal with. So I would say more so than other zooplankton sometimes. This is an example of why. So sometimes these jellyfish blooms can get really, really intensely packed together and then they just become impossible to work with. My camera did come out quite slimy after this. When we were doing the net toes for the drone work, we would sometimes get into a really thick bloom, and we would do a toe from the bottom up to the top. And the net would be so full of jellyfish that we would it would take three of us to pull it into the boat so we could count and measure everything. So these sometimes get very, very thick. And then you can see here that the bloom just stopped so we're not at the bottom yet, but for some reason all the jellyfish were just up at the surface. Which is interesting. And then it goes back up. So, I will. So, most of the work I do for my thesis right now deals with what jellyfish eats or jellyfish diets, we're trying to just characterize diets in British Columbia. Fortunately, I'm at a point in my thesis and because the presentation is recorded that I can't necessarily show any of my own data, because it's not published yet though, but I will still run through the background and talk a little bit about what we're doing. So, yes, one of the biggest questions I get is what do jellyfish eat. And the short answer to this is plankton. So for those of you that don't know what plankton is. They are like small organisms that float around in the water. They are like the plants and animals of the ocean so phytoplankton are like the plant plankton they're very small and hard to see with your naked eye. They have the same role as plants would on land so they take sunlight to create sugars and carbons and oxygen and yes they are just like plants basically. And then there's zooplankton which are like the animal plankton so there's two different kinds of plankton. And there's this interesting structuring of food webs in the ocean and the phenomena is that big tends to eat small so it's very size structured so the smaller you are usually means the lower on the food chain you are. Of course jellyfish are also considered zooplankton because they are drifters and their animals. So, but they are bigger than most zooplankton so jellyfish eat plankton that's the short answer to the to the question. But zooplankton are also kind of mixed in the water so if you were to take out a sample like if you were to scoop out a water sample you could find any of these in BC so there's like a fish larvae down here there's some like juvenile crabs and there's a jellyfish down here. This is a sea star larvae, some crab larvae, copepods of course, some krill. So the zooplankton are very mixed and because jellyfish don't really have eyes or a brain to process what's going on, if something gets stuck to their tentacles, they tend to eat it. So their prey can be very very mixed and really hard to pull apart because they feed on so many different things. And so for my pieces we're using, we call them biomarkers, just like things like stable isotopes, fatty acids, so we measure what's in the tissue of the jellyfish and assume that it reflects what they've been eating. So yeah, some of the zooplankton have markers that we can then pick up in the jellyfish and then say, oh they've eaten this plankton because they have this marker. There was an interesting study that was done, I don't remember how long ago, but basically they fed small pieces of paper to jellyfish to see if they would eat them and ate them. So jellyfish really are not picky eaters, not so far as we know anyways. There's another interesting phenomena that further complicates this whole jellyfish in the food web thing and it's that jellyfish eat other jellyfish as well. So this is a lion's mane jellyfish that I took a picture, this is the dock at Calvert, so that station I showed you before. Sometimes lion's manes come in a white morph, they're kind of, they're really pretty, and these are all moon jellyfish. So moon jellyfish are kind of at the bottom of the jellyfish food chain. They are eaten by many other kinds of jellies, including fried egg jellies like before. So this is a moon jellyfish that's being eaten right now. This one looks like he's on a breakaway, he's trying to get away. This one looks like he's about to run into a bad day. So yeah, they, this makes the picture even more complicated because not only do they feed on zooplankton, they also feed on each other. Okay, and so even though I can't show any of my own data, I do have a video from the field, so this is what it looks like when we collect jellyfish for processing in the lab later. And it's always raining in the field, so this is an accurate description of what it looks like. So we scoop up the jellies and we keep them in buckets and then jellyfish kind of feel like bags of water. So they're surprisingly heavy, but they're also really delicate because they are mostly water. So you'll see, you have to spray them down because they're very, they're full of mucus, like they kind of smell a little bit fishy and they're very slimy. And so they need to be sprayed a lot. So I feel like most of my job is measuring and spraying. And then you'll see when I go to put it in a bag, it kind of like breaks apart because this one is quite a big jellyfish and I can't really hold it in one hand. So I have to like scoop the little pieces back in with it, break apart surprisingly easily. And then we bag them up and then we stick them in this is a doer it's filled with liquid nitrogen so they freeze basically instantly. And then we take them back to the lab, and we measure what they're made of. Yeah, so that's what field work tends to look like. And then so the other end of this question is what eats jellyfish. So of course, food webs, the ultimate goal is to get energy from the very bottom of the food web up to the very top of the food web so the top predators. So that means that something must feed on jellyfish to get that energy going. But as I did say before jellyfish are mostly water, they're something like 96 or 97% water. So for a long time it was really thought that jellyfish were more of a nuisance they didn't really contribute anything but they did eat plankton and take them away from other animals that could eat them. There were a few known like well accepted examples of things that eat jellyfish so for example turtles. And that was one of the answers that came up in the poll at the beginning on sunfish in BC if you're lucky enough to have ever seen a sunfish they're beautiful they're huge animals and they live almost exclusively off jellyfish. They actually got their name sunfish from following smacks of jellyfish up to the surface of the water. And their other name is mola mola so maybe you've heard of them that way but they live in BC, and they eat jellyfish. Part of the issue is that if you were to open up the stomach of a mola mola. And you would probably just see nothing but like stomach goo because jellyfish is mostly water and so it digests really quickly and turns into goop so it's really hard to identify. And then you also don't know whether you're looking at a jellyfish or looking at just like other stomach goop. So now that we have more sophisticated methods that we can use to detect prey like genetics and like isotopes and fatty acids like I was talking about before. It turns out it's becoming more widely accepted that many things actually eat jellyfish everything from fish turtles sea cucumbers there's examples up here crabs seabirds lots of seabirds eat jellyfish. There's also video profiles on of sea lions and seals being jellyfish. And so this is now shifted from a question of what eats jellyfish before we weren't quite sure to a question now like why do these things eat jellyfish how can they even live off of jellyfish because they still are 96% water. But it turns out that jellyfish in that other 4% actually are packed with nutrients and things like protein carbohydrates fats so everything an animal would need to live. So animals use kind of like these two strategies to they think to eat jellyfish one of them is they target the the areas that are really rich nutrients of things like gonads. And stomach pouches tentacles. So instead of feeding on the bell, which is just mostly water they'll instead pick up things that are a bit more nutritious. The other side of this is that jellyfish blooms if you're lucky enough as a sea turtle to come across the jellyfish bloom, then you basically got a meal for the rest of the day you can just hang out in the bloom and gorge yourself. You eat jellyfish the water gets digested super fast so you can just keep eating and filling yourself up and then re eating filling yourself up and then eventually you'll get all the nutrients that you need. Yeah, so this is what this is now the accepted thing that people are still trying to sort out like why, why do you animals eat jellyfish but many of them do so that's a fun new development. I'm going to switch gears again so I did say I would come back and talk about the polyps. So, just as a reminder again the polyps are produced by these larvae that are produced by Medusa so this cycle starts with a Medusa planula larva and then the polyp. And then of course they can, they live in colonies and they can increase their numbers quite easily. So this is an example of how we collect polyps in the field so I'm actually doing like kind of a side project with polyps right now. They, yeah are difficult to work with I'll talk about it a bit again later, but to collect them we this is a moon jellyfish that we've kind of flipped on its back so you're looking at the oral arms. And inside the oral arms the female Medusa brewed these larvae in their tentacles so this is a close up view the larvae kind of live in these channels inside the tentacles. Yeah, they are this purple color which is kind of fun. And then so we can, we can extract those larvae. This is what they look like so when I say they're like fuzzy tic-tacs they really do. You can't see the, the cilia right now but they have these cilia all along the outside so when they swim around and they are looking real fuzzy they're pretty cute and they're also very small. So each of these larvae settle to become a polyp like this. This is a, on the black background it's much easier to see them because like the Medusa stage they are kind of see through. So this is what we settled these plates, they were white plates and put them out into the field and then of course they are colonized by other things so those plates were down for maybe six months I think and this is what they look like at the end. So white globs is a planilla, sorry a polyp. They are a lot harder to see now with the bad background but you can see that they have like kind of grown into an on top of everything so this is a barnacle and there's some polyps living on top of the barnacle. In some places they've kind of like kept their own little territories you can see that this patch here doesn't have much else living inside of it. Because yeah polyps they have tentacles just like the Medusa stage does and they kind of eat in the same way so they sting much smaller organisms and then eat them. And so when larvae of like barnacles or these hydroids or anything else are trying to settle chances are the polyps will pick them off before they get a chance to grow into something. So this is something fun that we've seen. And so this is a like a more magnified view these are the ones we kept in the lab at UBC. This scale bar is think around a millimeter. So it gives you an idea of how small these polyps actually are they're smaller than a millimeter. This is a top down view so this one here you can see his mouth is right in the middle. And then their tentacles have these stinging cells it's what all these like knobby lumps look like on here. They're stinging kind of the same way or not in the same way there. Well they're kind of like a sea anemone if you have seen sea anemones they their tentacles will pick out things in the water and then they kind of deposit it in their mouth. They send their tentacle back out and then they deposit it but of course they have like eight or 16 tentacles so it can be very busy during feeding time. It's fun to watch but yeah so we were keeping them downstairs in the building that I work in and sometimes if I was getting really tired of doing work I would just say well I have to keep my polyps and then I would spend an hour watching them under the microscope. So yes we don't have them anymore but it's sad but I did take a video so that I could keep them with me for a long time so again the scale bar down at the bottom 200 microns so 0.2 of a millimeter. This is sped up quite a bit so that's why they look a bit twitchy and then you'll see this one's about to open his mouth so you can see into it because they both open their mouth. And their stomachs are empty right now. You can see right to the bottom and they kind of they're shaped like a wine glass so this little like knob that you see down here would be kind of the where the stem connects to the cup. I'll just play that one more time because it's fun to watch. All these little bits that are swimming around in the water too they're just like small prey. One day it'd be really fun to put sound effects on top of this video. Okay I'm going to go back to this slide just quickly. The last point I want to touch on is how hard polyps are to work with so unfortunately these are moon jellyfish polyps so these are. Yeah from the same photo I showed you before where we took the larvae out of the moon jellyfish and then settled them. The issues with working with polyps are that they are incredibly small and they're hard to find because they happen so patchy. And also they're really hard to identify so if you do come across some polyps in the wild if you're diving or something. They're small so you have a hard time looking at them but then all the different species kind of look very similar and so they're very hard to identify. So for this reason there is actually not very much that we know about polyps they. They're not even kind of a mystery but what they eat in the wild there's been very little wild polyps studies most of the things we know come from lab work where people have fed them things and watch them eat it. And then been like oh polyps can eat you know tiny zooplankton or sometimes they've fed like small fish to polyps which are much bigger than the actual size of the polyp. But the polyp just holds on to the fish and then breaks off pieces of it and then digest it very slowly so. So this actually reflects what polyps eat in nature we don't know yet but hopefully this is something we're going to be able to figure out soon. The last point to make is that it turns out that these planula larvae are actually attracted they have like an affinity for man made things like plastics and wood and like common dock building material interestingly. So this has led to this phenomenon where we tend to see more polyps on docks. And when they release all their fire and grow into Medusa the Medusa tend to stay in the areas where all the human activity is and so this has led to an observation where we tend to find more jellyfish in areas with more human activity. And so because we don't have a lot of historical knowledge about jellyfish. We don't know whether this means that their populations are actually increasing or not or whether we're just getting better at noticing them. Yeah, this is an interesting thing that people have noticed for quite a while, and are kind of trying to tease apart right now. And as a polyp researcher I would argue that it starts with investigating the polyp stage. Great. Okay, so that's all I have today. This is the bibliography of all the photos that I borrowed. And I will leave my email address up there and I'm happy to take any questions now. So thank you very much for watching. That was that was really wonderful. Your images are beautiful and videos actually they played so well. Yeah, it was fascinating. Yeah, it was I just loved that Matt going down down down and then into the bloom into the jellyfish bloom that was beautiful. And the little polyps you could see was that actually a video of the polyps that we and we could see them just moving very slightly you said it was sped up right. Yes, it looked a bit twitchy because they they move pretty slowly so I had to speed it up. Otherwise we'd be watching like 10 minutes of footage. And just before we do the Q&A I'm just going to very quickly launch my poll which is, oh, is it here? I think it's here. Just I just want to find out how many people are actually watching. Oh, I guess it's not here. Okay, never mind. I won't do my poll. So let's just go into the questions then. So the first one that we've got here is how do predators on jellyfish avoid injury from the singing cells? Yeah, that's a good question that is pretty common. So there are two ways first as I mentioned before some there's actually quite a few jellyfish that don't have a very powerful sting. So I don't know if you've ever touched a sea anemone before this seems like a strange thing to ask. Well, most people have not. But if you do feel them maybe in like a touch pool at the aquarium or something, they kind of stick to you so you have to like really pull your hand away and you can feel it kind of feels like Velcro they've stuck to your fingers. And so the stinging cells are called nematocysts. They're like these tiny harpoons that are coiled up. And when they get triggered they like shoot out into your skin and then they release the neurotoxin. But a lot of species don't have a very powerful neurotoxin. So even though you get stung by the nematocyst, you don't actually feel it. So the effect is much bigger on small animals like zooplankton and then humans don't feel it as much. Of course, there are like common exceptions. A lot of the jellyfish around Australia can even be deadly. And some of the species in BC do sting, but I would say pretty confidently that most species in BC do not sting. And so animals actually don't really have a problem with feeding on them. The second way that they avoid getting hurt is that they kind of just avoid. So I know I said that they target the gonads but sometimes they target it from the top of the bell instead of the bottom. So sometimes they just avoid the tentacles as well. So they can kind of bite through the bell get to the gonads in the stomach and then just avoid the tentacles all together. Okay, okay, good. The next question from Richard again is do the polyps and the Medusa use suction to dry and food. Oh, that is a good question too. So kind of I'm imagining that you're asking kind of the same way a fish does where they open their mouth and it like creates a vacuum that sucks in fish. No, they don't. They do pulse with their bell so this is how they move through the water is they kind of like move the bell. And then they move towards and then move ahead a little bit and then do it again move ahead a little bit. And this current that they create on the outside of their bell can be used for feeding so it helps. Like, if an organism gets stuck in that current that's created while they're pulsing, then they're more likely to get caught up in the tentacles so it's a way that they have a kind of funneling food towards their tentacles. They don't like open their mouth any more to suck in food. Most of the movement towards their mouth happens through their tentacles. So the tentacles are actually very contractile sometimes jellyfish if they get disturbed their tentacles will get all like sucked up and then instead of having these beautiful long trailing tentacles they're all like tight up to their body. So I hope that answered the question. Wow. No, it's great. A lot of detail. It's great. What is the life cycle time between Medusa and polyp stage. Mm hmm. Yeah, I guess I didn't cover that very well in the life cycle diagram so the Medusa stage only lives for about in BC lives for about six or seven months so they tend to bloom sometime in like April early spring, and then they start to die off in like November December. So the Medusa stage is not very long and then they release their larvae in like November around October November, and then those settle and grow they spend the winter turning into polyps and then by the next spring those polyps are ready to, to strobe late to create more of fire. So this is one of the things that we were actually able to see with our poly plates was we went back into pictures of them every month, and then we were able to see them growing and then finally, creating more jellyfish, which was okay very cool. Okay. And you're learning this from work in the field that also when in your lab like you bring. And so some of the things you learn about them is just observing them in the lab. Is that right. Yeah, that's right I the thing about field work is that it can be very complicated there are so many things to take into account so like maybe this year was warmer than other years and so the things we see this year, don't necessarily reflect what happens all the time. But in the lab you can control the environment so good like the projects are really well suited if you can do parts of it in the lab and then kind of extrapolate what you've learned in the lab to field observations to get real data. Okay, good. Interesting. So there's a couple of questions about the blooms so Heather's asking, didn't I read about huge blooms of jellyfish off Asia a few years ago. Is there an update on that, and she's curious what was causing it, if it's true. Yeah, that's a good question so, especially in Japan there's some really famous stories that have come out of Japan. The pieces that they get there the numerized jellyfish I think is like the biggest in the world it's their massive. And they also happen in these very intense blooms and because Japan has so many kind of like little bays and nooks for them to get funneled into they they kind of take over an area very easily. And so there were issues with the fishermen in Japan where they were trying to haul in their fishing catch and instead they were just hauling in nets full of jellyfish and they couldn't like they could not catch the fish. There was even some cases where the nets were so heavy with jellyfish that some boats were capsizing so it was creating some really big problems. Yeah, it was. And this kind of, yeah, like highlighted how intense the effects of jellyfish blooms can be so this might be why you've heard stories out of Asia it's it's quite common in Korea actually they, they did an experiment where they were finding polyps and then trying to remove them so they were trying to do this like polyp eradication to try to like, you know, stop the effects, how big the blooms were happening in that area because they also were creating problems so they have been studied but it's just that we have a hard time figuring out how to control it how to deal with it. Like what the best strategies are so yeah so lots of open questions. Yeah, and obviously in the feet that's something you'd have to study in the field for sure. Yeah. What you're talking about blooms is do jellyfish blooms block motorboat intakes. Hmm, that's a good question too so actually this picture up here we have a, it's a two outboard motors down at the bottom so I mean there are lots of jellyfish here so it's not necessarily something that we need to get like ethics or anything for but when we are in a bloom of jellyfish they do tend to get caught up in the motors and kind of get I don't like chopped up a little bit it doesn't happen to a great extent compared to how many jellyfish are there but I don't know if an inboard motor would have significant problems I haven't heard of that. Because I imagine that they would just get chopped up by the motor or they cause any problems but the real problems come for like the factory intake cooling pipes for example sometimes jellyfish get caught on the mesh that they use to filter out stuff and then they just block the intake and then factories have been shut down because of it in some places too. Wow. Okay. Another question from Richard they seem to have coordinated muscular activity, despite not having a central nervous system. Any idea how they do that. So I do have a hard time explaining this to people because it's not very intuitive. I will come back to the analogy where they, they don't have a processing system so they have intake and outtake and output. So they can like sense things that are happening and they can react to them, but there's no, there's no thoughts going on they're not like oh there's like some prey over there I should go chase after them. They just kind of react to things they're like oh light means move. If that helps explain it at all, but they, so there's contractile cells. I would like basically say that they're always going like they're just always working, I think it's, they can speed up or slow down a little bit in some situations, especially if they've been aggravated so something has touched them they tend to speed up their contractions and that is totally just related to, they don't know what touched them if it's a predator if they bumped into a rock or something so it's just all reactionary. Okay. So another question about the medicinal sort of properties. Have any medicines or chemicals like enzymes been isolated from jellyfish. Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the avenues that people have taken because there are so many jellyfish and they're like pretty easy to grow in like aquaculture senses. People have been trying to isolate anything that they can from jellyfish so jellyfish do have collagen it's a type of protein we have it in our skin and people buy like collagen creams and collagen pills. So, there have been people that have tried to extract collagen from jellyfish and turn that into pills for people to take. So that 4% of jellyfish that's not water is actually very complex and full of basically the same things that were made out of that section if you were to just dry that out is actually very nutritious there's a lot of. fatty acid stuff which includes like omega six and omega three fatty acids which is something you might have heard of. If you're thinking about nutrition, so it's a really important fact for building muscle tissue or sorry, like myelin sheets but like a part to the brain, things that you need to build the brain that we can't make ourselves so we have to get them from our diet. So jellyfish actually do have a lot of these important nutrients that we need. And this is something that people are exploring quite a bit. So, are they considered a food source for humans I mean in your in your diagram you didn't show people as being predators who would eat jellyfish do we eat them here in BC. But it's more popular in Asia it's very popular in Asia actually they have okay. So the process is to dry the jellyfish out. I was at a conference last November so about a year ago. And one of the talks that somebody gave was the best way to dry out a jellyfish for food so he was trying ethanol and salt and just like air drying to figure out how you get like the best crispy jellyfish to eat afterwards so he was a food that was working on this problem. So people eat them in anything from salads sometimes they eat them as chips. So once you do dry out a jellyfish it turns into a little like flat, crispy. Yeah, like a chip basically. And they take on the flavor of whatever you cook them with I've heard so I actually have not myself tried jellyfish, but I was at one of the superstores in Richmond recently and I did see a jar of jellyfish there. Wow, probably imported from Asia. Yeah, I didn't check but I can imagine. Yeah, yeah. So they as far as you know the indigenous people on the coast didn't didn't bother eating them. Yeah, something I've been meaning to ask actually I haven't heard of it is being very common but I haven't asked honestly yeah well they had so much wonderful salmon to eat. Jellyfish right. Oh my goodness well that was so interesting thank you so much Jessica for for coming on all the way from Nelson. That was really really interesting. I don't see any other questions but I think we had some some really great ones so that's terrific wonderful. Yeah, thanks again for for bringing all your information and maybe we'll have you back in a few years when you publish your thesis and we'll hear more about it. Oh, great I can't wait. Okay, thanks so much. Okay, bye bye. Bye. Bye.