Stuff You Should Know - Jellyfish: Even Cooler than Octopi?

Episode Date: August 23, 2016

Jellyfish are among the most adaptable, competitive organisms on the planet. They can grow back into their juvenile stage when resources are scarce, reproduce in massive groups and kill an adult human, among lots of other neat stuff. Learn all about em! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, with Jerry, this is Stuff You Should Know.

Oh man, let's start over. All right. No, let's not. Okay. How you doing? I'm good. I'm jet lag still. I'm coming out of it for sure,

but yeah, I'm a little jet laggy. I just, I was explaining off mic that my body is at 4.30 or 5.00 every morning. Just get up, dummy. It's 10.15, 11. Yeah. And I go, no, it's not, it's dark. Is it?

No. Is it up? It's an internal struggle, and it's a British voice too. It's like, get up. You need your beans and blood sausage. And pork pies. How was that? Oh man, I want another one so bad.

You know, save that. Okay. My jet lag is not so much pronounced in the morning. It's just at 9.30 at night. I fall over wherever I'm standing or sitting. You're just like cooking in a wok, and you just fall face forward into it. Yeah, face first.

You notice the burn face? Yeah, that's dangerous. Well, it hurt pretty bad, because that wok grease gets pretty hot. It does. Walk. What is this, like 1987? What, walks?

Two walks still. Dude, you kidding me? No. It's our continents of people walk. Oh, well, sure. But I guess I just imagined wearing a tennis sweater tied around my neck and... I didn't say fondue.

That should have. You're having a fondue party. Fondue, right? You fall face first into a pot of boiling cheese. That's pretty 70s. You know what, if you ever want a fondue pot, and like, just because you think it'd be fun to have a fondue party, don't buy one new.

Just go to Goodwill. Get one, sure, yeah. You can buy one for like $3. Yeah, you mean I have an unused one? Sure. Is it pea green? I don't know if I would cook out of a pea green anything. No?

Yeah. All right. No, I wouldn't. Pea green refrigerator would need out of it. Pea green car. I'd just throw up anytime I want to go drive. I'll tell you what I am excited about, though. Jellyfish?

Yeah, this is now officially my second favorite seafaring creature. After octopus? Yeah. Cis? For sure. Yeah. And this was close, too, like,

the jellyfish was really tugging at my heartstrings. Oh, really? Yeah, and the octopus just kept saying, you know, what, remember me? Yeah, remember me? Remember the chromatophores? Watch this. Bam.

That looks like something completely different. And then I remembered, I was like, all right, octopus, you're right. Jellyfish can't do that. I'm lucky to squirrel. Now I'm a Roman soldier. Now I'm a cornucopia of vegetables and an oil painting. They are pretty cool.

Yeah, but the jellyfish is really amazing. Yeah, the octopuses, though, they're like, they're doing it on purpose. The jellyfish just accidentally kind of stumbles backwards into awesomeness, you know? Well, after 500 million years of practice. Maybe 700 million. Yeah.

We'll see. It's amazing. So when you're talking about jellyfish, a lot of people say, well, there's jellyfish. That's jellyfish. That's a jellyfish. That lady walking down the street with the leash got a jellyfish on the end of it.

And you would say jellyfish, jellyfish, comb jelly, dog. Right. Or a weird cat lady who walks her cat. Yeah, that's unwholesome. That's as unwholesome as walking a jellyfish down the street on a leash. So there are such things as comb jellies, and there's jellyfish.

And you out there, who's lived maybe 10, 20 years on this planet or more, have probably seen them both. But it turns out that they look very similar. But as we're finding out, as we get deeper and deeper into using genetics to do taxonomy rather than our peepers. Sure. That doesn't necessarily mean they're related. And actually, there's some tremendous debate between just

how closely related jellyfish and comb jellies are. Tremendous debate? Yes. We're very subdued. It depends on where you are. Among, like, 50 people. If you're in the jellyfish department of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I'll bet it gets nuts.

A little vigorous. They down some old English 40 malt liquor and argue. And to get out the brass knuckles. About taxonomy. So the two phyla, they are different. We're talking, respectively, for jellyfish and comb jellies, Nidaria and Tanaphora. Yeah, nice.

And there's seas before both of them. Both silent. So it looks like Cenobites and Sephora. Yeah. Cenobites? Yeah. What is that, a Cenobun? No, Cenobites.

They were the monsters in Hellraiser. Oh, I thought it was like a Cenobun that was in handy bite-sized pieces. That's a Cenobite. These are Cenobites. Gotcha. Where did this research come from, by the way? Big shout out.

Smithsonian. They have a site called the Ocean Portal. Amazing. That has all sorts of great stuff on it. Yeah, you can't go wrong with Smithsonian. That's their logo. This forms the basis of this one. But I also want to give a huge shout out

to another article I read a while back that I went back and re-read. Actually, it's called They're Taking Over. And it was the New York Review of Books article on it. Yeah. Well, it reviewed a book on jellyfish. Yeah, specifically jellyfish blooms. Or when you see on the news, like, oh my gosh,

there's 5,000 jellyfish right here right now. Right. Or 33,000 square miles of jellyfish. But we'll get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting ahead of ourselves. So there's jellyfish and comb jellies. And we don't know if they're related.

They look a lot alike. They're very much, they seem related. So we're going to talk about both. Yes. Right? So let's talk about them, Chuck. All right, well, we'll start off with the body. Because, well, they're kind of all body.

They, both jellyfish and comb jellies, have a lot of differences. But when you look under the hood, they have a lot of similarities. Which is why you would expect when people use their peepers, they would just think, well, yeah, of course, they're the same look at them. But don't, don't think too.

Don't overthink it. That was early science. Don't overthink it. So both of them have a couple of major cell layers, the external epidermis and then the internal one called the gastrodermis. And in between those is what you think of as jellyfish. Yeah.

That's the mesoglia. Yeah, which is a great name for that. And it's the filling. Yeah. You know? It's 95, and in fact, jellyfish and comb jellies are about 95% water. Yeah, sea water, actually.

Salt and water, they're basically made up of the sea I saw put somewhere. Yeah. It's amazing. So they have basically one mouth where stuff goes in and comes out. It's like an oral anus, basically. Yeah, I don't even know if they refer to it as a mouth,

do they? Like somewhere in this thing, didn't they? They called it literally like a body hole or something? Yeah. It's a pretty basic organism, but it does a lot of things. Yeah. So when you think of mouth, you just think eating, not necessarily, hey,

let's put some sperm and egg in there too. Right. It's like all purpose. Yeah. But they don't necessarily need a mouth for eating because apparently they can absorb nutrients, like just through their skin. Yeah, so they don't have a stomach.

They don't have intestines. Right. They don't have lungs. They're just like, get in my skin, nutrients. Yeah, and oxygen. And if you think about it, then they don't need lungs. Nope. They don't need like a mouth, so they don't need to chew.

Right. All this stuff requires a lot of energy. They actually are extraordinarily efficient organisms. Sure. So they get a lot more energy out of the stuff they take in than other things, which actually gives them a huge advantage as we'll see later. So the outer cells, they have this epidermis, like we said.

And it has what's called a nerve net. And it's just this net of nerves, literally, and that it's their nervous system, basically. And it's the most basic, I guess, brain-like structure of any organism on the planet, of any multicellular organism, I guess. That's right. And so in the nerve net, not only does it have nerves,

it also has some sort of specialized cells, like some that detect light so they can know that they need to move away from that boat spotlight. Sure. And then some that tell them whether they're moving up or down or whether they're upside down. Yeah, you big dummies. That's a big one.

You think about it, but I mean, that's If you don't have eyeballs. No, but this is the weird part. Man, this is so disturbing to me. This is almost as disturbing as squid having beaks. OK. Some types of jellies, box jellies in particular, box jellyfish have eyes.

They have retinas. That's creepy. Lenses. But they don't have a brain. So scientists are like, how are you processing these images that you're clearly taking in and responding to? Like, we've shown you pictures of Cheryl Ladd

and you gave a thumbs up. So obviously, you can use these eyes, but how are you sorting these images, you know? Yeah, they think it's that nerve ring, but they're not sure. Right. And that's a ring around concentration of nerves, basically, that they haven't figured out yet, but they think that's there and is the secret.

Right. It'd be like, no, I can't come up with a good analogy. There's a million of them out there, but I'm not still jet lagged, I guess. You'll think it won't. I just want to apologize to everybody, because that could have been great. I was on the edge of my seat.

So comb jellies, they have a few things that the regular jelly does not have. Most notably, the comb, their name for these cilia, these giant fused cilia, there's eight rows up and down their bodies, and they basically are their ways of locomoting. They're like little bitty oars paddling around in the water. Yeah.

And there are other animals that do this, but the comb jelly is the largest one to do this and to use this kind of locomotion. Right. And it looks like a rainbow. If you look one up, you think it might be bioluminescent, but it's not. It's just light catching the cilia and scattering it.

It's beautiful. Yeah. It is quite beautiful. But that's the thing that separates comb jellies from jellyfish most pronouncedly, right? Yeah. Because a lot of their activities and just the stuff that they do is fairly similar.

The TV they watch. Yeah. But their means of locomotion are really the huge distinction. Yeah. A lot of the comb jellies have a single pair, just two tentacles, but it looks like more because they branch out. Right.

And they use those like little fishing lines because they have sticky cells, cobalt blast at the end. And this is different big time than jellyfish. They don't sting. No. They use glue. Yeah. Which is pretty neat.

So you won't be stung by a comb jelly. So just swim up and hug one. Yeah. They love it when you do that. So when you think of a jellyfish, like a true jelly is what they're called, you think of this bell-shaped, umbrella-shaped thing with the tentacles hanging down.

Yeah. Beautiful. And if it's a jellyfish, that's actually one of two forms that it will take in its lifetime. Yeah. Right? That's the Medusa form. And it's the adult form.

Yeah. There's a juvenile form called a polyp. And depending on when it is in its life cycle, it will either be in Medusa form or polyp form. Yeah. And we'll get into this a little more of the life cycle, but a polyp can end up becoming a Medusa or just might be happy as a polyp.

And just stay as a polyp and create more Medusa. Yeah. And the polyp looks like, it almost looks like a plant. It looks like a little stalk attached to something, usually the sand, or as we'll see, maybe a oil rig out in the middle of the ocean or something. Or share a lad. That's right, because she's a deep water dweller at this point.

So it looks like a little plant. It looks like a little stalk. And then the tentacles are blooming out of it almost like a flower. Yeah, like anemone or something like that. Yeah. And sometimes you see many, many of them together in a colony. You think, that's an amazing plant. And it's actually a jelly.

Yeah. Pretty cool. If you would be able to tell if you poked it with your finger. That's right. So the size among jellies and comb jellies are, I mean, some are just microscopic. Yeah. Others get pretty big.

There's one called the lion's mane jellyfish, which on the whole, across the whole species, they are the largest jellyfish known to humankind. Did you see this thing? Yeah. It looks like Photoshop when you see a scuba diver up next to one of these. Yeah, it definitely does. Like the bell actually gets to be six feet wide.

Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah, and the tentacles are like 49 feet long, 50 feet long. Yeah. And some get bigger than that, but that's, you know, the average size of one of those is pretty neat. Yeah, I mean, they're not to be feared, but swimming up to something that large and that kind of creepy looking is not for me.

Yeah. That's all I'll say. That eats anything. It'll eat anything. Like people? Yeah. No, it won't eat a person. Yeah, I don't know.

If they were big enough, it might. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the various types. We'll start with Nadaria, which is the jellyfish itself, not the comb. There are more than 10,000 species, and about 4,000 or fewer, actually, are what we think of as the true jelly, the medusa that we know and love. Mm-hmm. And within that, there are quite a few different types, one of which is the skifozoa.

And this is the most common true jellyfish that you can imagine. Right. When you picture jellyfish in your mind, you're probably thinking of the skifozoa. Right. The hydrazoa are. Imposters. Well, they're the ones who, they spend most of their time as polyps, right?

So the skifozoa spend most of their time in the medusa phase. Yeah. The hydrazoa are the ones that look like plants at the bottom and are just reproducing like mad. Right. And they actually can come together and create what are called colonial siphon of force. Whoa. And that's a, you know, a Portuguese man of war?

Yeah, yeah. OK, so that is actually not a true jellyfish. It's actually a collection. It's a, it's a colony that comes together to act like one large organism, right? Oh, wow. And it's made up of persons. So like there's the person that is in charge of digestion. There's the person that's in charge of catching prey.

There's the person that's in charge of locomotion. And rather than these things being body parts, they're actually individual organisms that are genetically identical to one another because they all come from the same egg. Yeah. But they're actually a colony. Does that make sense? Like imagine if your organs were various actual organisms.

Yeah, yeah. That came together to make you. It's like the polyphonic spree of the ocean world. Exactly. It's amazing. That's exactly what I was driving at. Next up, we have the Cubazoa and that's, you mentioned the box jellyfish. They look like a box.

It's more squared looking. Those are the most dangerous ones. Yeah, they have the most potent venom and it is serious stuff. Not just the jellyfish of any animal on the planet. Yeah. The sea wasp has the most powerful venom for humans, I should say. The sea wasp. Isn't that just awesome sounding?

Yeah. That sounds like something you want to avoid at all costs. Yeah. So these guys are the ones that have a more complex nervous system, that have the eyes, right? Yeah. With the corneas and things. Yeah.

So they're the most deadly. And they're looking at you. Yeah. They're saying, I'm coming for you. The Starozoa stocked jellyfishes and they don't float. They are actually like to cling on to things and attach to things. Yeah. And they're mainly cold water.

But you can find most all kinds, or not all kinds, you can find some kind of jellyfish in almost any kind of water, any kind of ocean water in the world. Well, not just that. There's some thrive in freshwater. There's a type of jellyfish that is all over the Great Lakes. Oh, yeah. It was originally, it's native to China.

And they think that it was brought over originally from China to England in like a water lily shipment. Because it was first discovered in the West in like garden ponds. And it somehow made its way to the Great Lakes. And now there's a freshwater jellyfish that's about, I think, the size of your thumbnail, depending on what size your thumbnail is, in the Great Lakes. That's a jellyfish and it's a true jellyfish.

And we should say also, with jellyfish locomotion, they don't use the cilié like a comb jellyfish does. They, in Medusa form, expand and contract their bell. So beautiful. And I was reading, I think it was a scientific American or popular science, one of those two. I'll post it on the podcast page. But it was, some researchers examined how jellyfish move.

And they found that not only are they able to move when they expand and then contract, in the resting motion of their bell, a vortex actually forms in the water above them and moves beneath them and moves them up that way. So they're constantly moving, but they're only exerting like half of the energy needed to move forward, to propel forward or upward, right?

So that's even one more way that they're an incredibly efficient type of animal, yeah. Without a brain, they're pretty smart. Yeah, you know what I mean? Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break and we're going to come back and dive into the wonderful world

of comb jellies. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we talked about just a few of the standard jelly fish. The comb jellies are way, way fewer species of the tinnophores. We're talking, I think, 10,000 for the other. This is about 100 to 150. Yeah, not even 150,000, 150.

Yeah. But they're saying that it's possible that these are just the ones we are aware of because we've encountered them in coastal waters, that there may be way more in deep sea. Yeah, they don't know much about those guys, right? Right. And the ones that are in deep sea that we've encountered

tend to be so fragile that we can't collect them. Yeah, because they're not tough, because they don't have to put up with currents and waves, and they just float out there, and you look at them too hard, and they crumble. So one type of a comb jelly is Cedipid, and they are all round. They're spherical or oval.

They have those branch tentacles that we talked about. Those tentacles are a little unique, and they can actually draw them back into the body. When it's cold. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Really? Yeah. Oh, OK.

So you have believed it? Yeah, and they have sheaths on the sides of their mouths that it draws back into, which is pretty cool. Amazing. Yeah. And then there's lobates, which have lobes on the sides, right? Yeah.

And that's about it. They have the lobes, and that's what they're known for. Yeah. Baroids, these are kind of cool. These are the dudes that have no tentacles. So the way they eat is they have a big, big mouth that draws in a lot of stuff, and then a very tight, almost zipper-like thing that shuts.

And then they can shut that mouth really hard and just mush all that stuff up. Well, they have cilia inside their mouths that act like teeds that pull their prey apart alive. Teeds? Tooths. Teeth. Yeah.

Oh, man. That was weird. Jet lag. Yep. But the teeth just pick at their prey and just pull them apart. It dissolves them, basically, mechanically. Amazing. Have you ever seen a video of the pelican who's just

standing there, and there's a pigeon on the ground right in front of him? And all of a sudden, the pelican just eats the pigeon. And the pigeon's trying to get out of the pelican's like huge mouth, and the pelican's just sitting there like nothing's happening. And then finally, the pigeon stops moving. It is really disturbing.

Wow. Because you know, pelicans don't normally eat live pigeons. So it was like, there's something wrong with this pelican, or it was just so. And then the steely reserve, like no remorse whatsoever. Yeah. It's a disconcerting video. Wow.

Especially if you're a pigeon lover, which I'm not. It's not like I hate pigeons, but. You don't want to see them get eaten by a pelican. Yeah, it's weird. That is totally strange. Where do you find this stuff? Just around. It's so weird.

I think Yumi showed me that one. Yeah, you guys always have a lot of weird videos at your fingertips. You and Yumi are just always talking about like, did you see the one where, you know, the pelican ate the pigeon? Yeah. I guess so. It's pretty neat. Sure.

Comb jelly's distribution wise, they are also all over the oceans. They do prefer a little warmer water though, but you can find them anywhere. Right. So we were talking earlier about the fact that they are from different phyla, and that there's this, you know, drunken argument going on among scientists. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

How closely related they are. They used to all be described as a selenirata. Which is hollow bellied. Oh yeah. Makes sense. But they don't, they don't say that anymore. No, man, if you want to be ridiculed by your peers, call them that. But some people say, you know, they're sister group.

Some people say, nope, they're not even that closely related. So the debate rages on, I guess. Yep. So what's interesting is that we even know how long jellies have been around because they're, they have no solid parts. Yeah, you'd think it'd be hard to find a fossil. Or no, they have gelatinous parts. They don't have any hardened parts.

Yeah, that would be fossilized easily. But there have been some discoveries, some amazing discoveries of jellyfish and comb jellies from about 500 million years ago. It's the, I believe the oldest known specimens found. And there's this one found in Utah. Because apparently Utah used to be a shallow inland sea. And it had these jellyfish in it. And I guess something happened to this jellyfish that was crushed by a rock.

Yeah, there's a lot of pressure, I would think. But all of a sudden, it just captured it because it's like a perfect, it's like a drawing of a jellyfish in a rock. It's amazing. And it's the oldest fossil. And it's 500 million years old. So it was a pretty lucky find, actually, to find this jellyfish that should not have been fossilized, that was fossilized.

So we do know that they're about 200 or 150 million years older than fish. Fish weren't even around by then. And they think that possibly sea comb, or jelly comb, or sorry, comb jellies, were, it's possible they were the earliest animals to branch off even more, even earlier than sponges. Well, didn't they find that the jellyfish was the first animal in the sea that didn't just float along like a dummy that actually used muscles to swim places? Yeah, and it was possible it was the comb jellies that did that.

So it's possible the comb jellies branched off from the Tree of Life. So it's just one type of animal. Then all of a sudden there's a comb jelly, right? What is this black magic you speak of? And then maybe the jellyfish at some later point branched off of the comb jelly, right? But either way, it would have been the comb jelly and or the jellyfish that were the first to say, we're going this way. Yeah, you guys are just floating around like a bunch of morons waiting for food to hit

you. We're embarrassed for you. Well, speaking of food, they are all carnivorous and they eat, like you said, they'll eat anything. They love plankton, but they eat fish, they eat crustaceans, some eat other jellyfish, which is disgusting. And those nematocyst and coloblasts, the stingers or the glue guns, they are good for defense, but there are 150 animals that also eat the jellies, fish and sea turtles.

There's the sunfish loves them. Leatherback sea turtles love them? They journey to find them. That's how much they love them. The Chinese? Yeah. They eat human beings eat jellyfish. Yeah.

It's apparently a wedding delicacy in China and has been for about 15, 1600 years. Ours is catered salmon and chicken marbella. Yeah, 425,000 tons of jellyfish are caught each year in 15 countries, mainly in Southeast Asia is where they're eating these. Yeah, but I read that Georgia, our state of Georgia has a commercial jellyfish fishery. Really? Yeah. Big Jim's jellies?

Yeah. You would eat. Preserved in moonshine. You could totally eat jellyfish, wouldn't you? Sure, I would try it. Apparently it's also, it's served in Japan too, it's salted, which would be good. I would try it. I would try raw jellyfish in sushi or something like that, but I would guess that salted

strips of jellyfish are probably vastly preferable. I'm not nearly as adventurous as you with my mouth and my stomach, but I might try jellyfish even though I'm talking about how much I love it. Right, you just cry while you eat. Yeah, exactly. Look at the tiny. You were so beautiful once. Well I would eat woolly mammoth.

Oh yeah, and you like them. Yeah. You got to bring floss when you eat woolly mammoth. Supposedly that does nothing. Have you heard about that? Oh yeah, then the new studies, it's flossing is no good. Well, I think we talked about that, didn't we? I think what they said, it depends on who you talk to.

Some people are saying like, no, they just realized that no one's ever done a scientific study to back up that flossing is good for you. Some people are saying like, no, they did some studies and found that it doesn't do anything, which I cannot believe. We either just talked about this the last recording session or we talked about it on stage. Oh, we probably talked about it on stage because it came out while we were in the UK. Okay.

Yeah. All right. But the idea that getting rotting food out from between your teeth has no positive health benefits for you is just, it defies explanation. Agreed. It's not on stage because I made a crack about missing my teeth. Oh yeah. I remember now.

Feeding, as far as them feeding on other things, we talked about these tentacles that they have to capture prey. And these nematocysts, it's amazing. These basically they're described in the article as venom bearing harpoons. So what happens is there's a cue. It's either something has touched them or it's a chemical cue that something is around and they shoot out this little harpoon and within 700 nanoseconds, it spears the prey and releases a toxin.

Yes. And it's, it's frightening. Yeah. If you, if you're a fish, you're in trouble. If you're another jellyfish, you're in trouble. Something smaller than that, you're just totally dead. And depending on the jellyfish, if you're a human being, you can die as a matter of fact too.

Yes, we talk about that, dude. Yeah. There's the sea wasp, obviously, which has the most toxic venom on earth as far as humans are concerned. Yeah. But then there's also another type of box jellyfish that are much tinier. I think they're about thumb sized or peanut sized. Yeah.

You don't even see these things. Or if you do see them and they brush against you, you're probably not even going to feel the sting. They're so small. It's called a irikonji. Yeah. Which is an aboriginal word for, for this type of jellyfish, right? Mm-hmm.

A dude in the 60s, a Westerner, who was like, what is with this jellyfish? I've heard weird things about it. I don't know much about it. I'm going to go out and let myself get stung by one. Yeah, where can you get killed very easily by something at any given point? Australia. Yeah, exactly. Because they're the ones, they've got the sea wasps too.

Oh, yeah. And they have to deal with the sea wasps and these little guys, the irikonji. Is that how we agreed we were going to say it? Yeah, irikonji. Irikonji. So this guy survived, but he, not, not well, but he had a hard time getting to the point where they're like, you're going to survive. Yeah.

He was lucky to survive. Yeah. So you get a sting from one of these things, just a single tentacle apparently in about 20 to 30 minutes, what's called a irikonji syndrome starts to set in. Yeah. And you feel it in your lower back first, right? Yeah. And you don't know you've been stung.

So you're just like, oh man, like I tweaked my back out there in the ocean. And then things really start going south. Yeah. Then you go, and throw up your right kidney. Yeah. And this article you said, it feels like someone hits you with a baseball bat and your kidneys and then comes the nausea and vomiting, which continues every minute or so for around 12 hours.

Yeah. You get spasms in your arms and legs, your blood pressure increases, your skin begins to creep. It says as if worms are burrowing through it. Yeah, I saw a video of a guy who was stung and he said it felt like someone was pouring acid all over my body. Yeah. From just being brushed by this thumb sized, tiny little jellyfish.

And then there's, this is the creepiest thing to me. It says victims are often gripped with a sense of impending doom and beg their doctors to kill them. Yeah. Can you imagine? And they're spreading their range actually. They found them off the coast of Florida. They found them off the coast of South Africa.

Geez. Yeah. So yeah, they're not to be messed with. All right. So down with Irokanji, right? Have you ever heard that you should pee on somebody who's been stung by a jellyfish? I've seen friends. So that's not true.

Yeah. They've actually found that could make it worse. Total myth. Yeah. But there's actually some science to it, right? Yeah. So if you get stung by a jellyfish, if it's a tentacle hits you and you're stung by a nematocyst.

Yeah. And the leftover ones still attached to your arm, right? Yeah. And you want to get rid of those. But if you get rid of them, if you pour, say, just fresh water on them, you're going to trigger the little harpoons inside because they're held in place by a specific concentration of solutes. Yeah.

Right? So if you change that concentration by hitting it with fresh water, you're going to set them off. Yeah. So you want to do. Yeah. Because they're held in check in seawater normally. Yeah.

So you use seawater to wash it off and then you take a credit card and scrape the rest of them off. Yeah. Or just some kind of, you know, if you don't have your credit card on you. Sure. Fear not. But supposedly you're supposed to keep sand out of it, which is tough to do. Sure.

You're probably at the beach. I did a don't be dumb on it years back. Oh, really? Yeah. On the, what'd you do in the chair? All sorts of weird stuff. You remember? All right, well, getting back to the feeding, we covered the harpoon.

The nematocyst. Of the jelly. But the comb jelly, like we talked about earlier, that this is the nematocyst. They have the glue instead of the venom. So what they do is they just send out that fishing line and release that sticky glue and it reels whatever it catches right on into the mouth. Yeah. Pretty cool.

Yeah. Like something being sucked toward the Death Star. Yeah. Exactly. A tractor beam. You got caught in a tractor beam, basically. Should we take a break? Oh, wait.

There was one other thing. So one type of comb jelly, this is so awesome. They actually eat true jellies and then they take their nematocysts and use them for their own hunting. How? Like, how so? They, they absorb them. Yeah.

And shoot them out in their tentacles. They save them. Yeah. They tuck them in their cheek for later. Can they get an unlimited supply of these? I don't know. I was curious if you could see one with like 300 of them. He's like, look how many I've eaten.

It's like, don't be a pig. Sure. You spit some of those out. Now can we take a break? Yes. All right. By the way, we just satisfied that one listener because you rejected my break. Oh, yeah, that's true.

How about that? Man, a lie. All right. We'll be back and talk a little bit about defense. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step

by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. All right. So I promise talk of defense. Um, these things, you've probably seen jellyfish and comb jellies that produce light, this bioluminescence. Although when I said earlier, the comb jelly, when it looks colorful, that is not bioluminescence. They are still bioluminescent, just not in that way. Right.

It's so confusing. They actually do produce light. They have these proteins that have a chemical reaction to produce this blue and green light when something might touch it. And yeah, like moon jellies are well known for this. Oh yeah. And they're not exactly sure why, but they think that this could be a defensive mechanism to like either scare someone trying to eat you by turning a light on their face or turning

a light on and attracting something larger to eat that thing. Right. Either way, they think it's defense. And then alternately, some jellyfish have camouflage actually. Not as good as the octopus. No, no, no, no, not at all. Okay. But I mean, obviously some are most are transparent.

It's pretty good camouflage. Yeah. Um, and then some of the deep sea ones are actually red. They produce a red pigment and the red apparently is very, very difficult to see in deep water, which is like 200 meters or more. There's no light. Yeah. You'd think it would be black, but they say that the red is easier to produce than black.

Right. Exactly. So black would work. It's just, you try making black pigment. Yeah. You can't. No. Red.

And red's the same down there. Yeah. It's all the same. So, um, some of them do that. And then others have just red pigment in their gut so that if they eat a bioluminescent organism, it's not going to accidentally attract a predator to come check them out. Interesting. Yeah.

See, this is really, the octopus is threatened in my heart. Still? A little bit now that I'm talking about this again. It's unstable. We'll see. I'll give a final vote at the end. So to me, this is, now we get to the most amazing part. Well, one of the most amazing parts about jelly.

Sexy time? Yeah. So. Which is not very sexy. No. Although it's like every kind of sex you can imagine jelly fish engage in. Yeah. And not just different species, like individuals.

Sure. Some are hermaphroditic. Yeah. Some are, um, sexually, uh, divided. Yeah. Some. Some are asexual. Yep.

Some, yeah. Some reproduce asexually. Sometimes in some species, like the moon jelly, I believe, they'll all get together in one big mass and just start swapping sperms and eggs. Yep. Like that mouth hole of theirs. Get some boxed wine. All right.

Get the parties on. Put on Michael Bolton. Though your house, your house keys in a big wooden bowl. All right. There you have it. That's the jellyfish way. Uh, so the Medusa that, that you know and love is the main true jelly, they spawn. So what they do is they release a bunch of eggs and sperm into the open ocean.

Yeah. Uh, a lot of times all together and they do this from their mouth hole and take it in, in their mouth hole and, uh, the sperm meets the egg and that's how it happens. Yeah. Ideally. Or, um, in some kinds, the, uh, the eggs stay in the mouth of the female and the male just shoots sperm out into the water and the sperm find their way into the mouth. It's a way to go.

Yeah. Or they fertilize outside in the water, like you were saying. Yeah. Um, and then in others, they're, uh, they, they don't even necessarily get together. Do the polyps. Yeah. They'll just be like a polyp will just be sitting there spewing out sperm or eggs, gametes. Yeah.

Like all day long. Uh-huh. And then one type spews out like 40 through 46,000 a day, every day, all the time. Um, and then the whole idea is that eventually maybe it'll run into another gamete and fertilize out. That's the comb jelly, actually. Oh, is that a comb that does that? Yeah.

Okay. Uh, the polyps are the ones that are asexual and they just bud and divide in half basically to produce a little identical buddy and then that can stay a polyp or it can eventually become a medusa. Yeah. Cause that's the thing, like the polyp is a, it's a stage of a jellyfish, the jellyfish life cycle. Oh, it can be.

Which is cool. Or it can be it. Yeah. That's true. You can, you can just stay a polyp or you can eventually become a medusa. Yeah. And we didn't say that the, the, uh, depending on the jellyfish, it might live for a few weeks or a year.

Yeah. Apparently they, they do better in captivity and tend to live up to several years in captivity. Yeah. They're pretty fragile out there in the ocean. Yeah. Um, but they can reproduce so frequently and so early on in their life cycle, um, that they, they can populate an area very quickly to put, despite having a very short lifespan. Yeah.

Uh, and then in the polyp stage, some species can stay there for, well, basically almost indefinitely. Yeah. And just sit there and reproduce. There's a type of reproduction in the polyp stage where, um, it's called strobilation. And the little polyp is sitting there, just shooting off these little discs, 10 to 15 at a time. Yeah.

And they found that depending on the temperature of the water, um, and the warmer the water, the more they strobilate, um, they'll be more and more jellyfish that they just kind of shoot off. Like this article put it like shooting off clay pigeons. Yeah. Yeah. It transforms into a Medusa. Man.

That's amazing. Yeah. Octopus. Yeah. It's in trouble. Uh, and then, oh, this is super cool. The, uh, turritopsis neutrocula, it is basically immortal. It is a hydrazone and it can actually revert back to the polyp stage after the Medusa stage

through trans differentiation and live forever, essentially, unless it gets killed, obviously by something, uh, and it is the only animal that anyone knows of that can do this. Yeah. Amazing. There's another type of turritopsis too that, um, when it dies, it disintegrates, but it sells some cells as it's, as it's decaying, come back and form another individual. Yeah. So it basically fertilizes itself using its dying body and regenerates.

This is like Star Wars. So it lives forever. Yeah. Yeah. It's tapped into the force. All right. So we talked earlier about these jellyfish blooms, um, or outbreaks or plagues, storms. What else?

That's it. Okay. Um, it's just great that these things are, uh, proliferating like other species that aren't, but it can get out of hand. It can, uh, interfere with people, uh, it can interfere with machinery at power plants on the coast. Yeah. Uh, cause power outages, outages, fisheries, they can get in the way where people are trying

to fish for something else and all they're getting are jellyfish. Yeah. And there's been examples of all of this stuff happening over time. Like they shut down the USS Ronald Reagan once, which is a nuclear powered warship because it got a bunch of jellyfish got sucked up into the cooling system. Um, they've shut down power plants in India, in Japan, in the Philippines. Yeah. Um, and they think this, there's, if there's a debate over whether comb jellies and jellyfish

are related, there's a huge debate over whether or not we're seeing a natural outcome of, uh, just jellyfish life cycles, blooms like this is just happening. Yeah. Is this a normal thing or are we humans contributing to it? And if we humans are contributing to it, they basically say there's probably one of four ways that this is happening. Yeah. One of them is overfishing basically just less competition for food.

Uh, they, they're eating this zooplankton. And if other fish that normally eat that aren't there, then the jellyfish like sweet. More for me. Big buffet open. Apparently jellyfish are not known to, um, go on diets. They just gorge themselves constantly. Really? Yeah.

They just gorge themselves. Nutrients. Yeah. When we, uh, when we release fertilizers from crop land into areas where jellyfish live, we can cause algal blooms. Yeah. It runs off eventually into the sea. Yeah.

And it actually can deplete oxygen. So there's two things. One, you've got, uh, a bunch of zooplankton and phytoplankton, which, um, well, I guess they're eating the zooplankton that jellyfish eat, right? Yeah. And then you have lower oxygen, which jellyfish can live in and survive in a lot more easily. Because again, they have a much lower metabolism than most other organisms that they're competing for food with.

Yeah. So their competition again is dying off while they're just like, this is great. I'll just keep eating more all day. Thank you humans for putting all this nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. You started to get the idea why these things have been around for 500 to 700 million years. How can they compete? Climate change with the warming ocean. Some of those jellies love it.

Their embryos and larvae develop better and more quickly. So the populations grow more quickly and a lot of them prefer that warmer water. So they say, bring it on. Yeah. And they're actually, like I said, there was at least one study that looked at how jellyfish reproduce in warmer water and also water that's of higher acidity, which they're predicting through ocean acidification, which is the result of higher CO2 increases. And both of those suggest that jellyfish are going to do just fine under the climate change

that we're facing. So cockroaches and jellyfish are the only things that are going to be around one day. Yeah. And then finally, what they call ocean sprawl is, you know, we're building things out in the middle of the ocean now, drilling platforms and docks and oil platforms, hard structures and jellyfish, the polyps, especially that we were talking about, that they attach to something sand or Cheryl Ladd's belly button is not the easiest thing to attach to. Oh, Cheryl Ladd was born without a belly button.

That's her claim to fame. That was very insensitive of me. You just threw me there. Sorry. What they do love to attach to is something solid. So they love, they love attaching onto the ocean sprawl and oil rigs and whatever else is out there. And they do very well attached to a firm, not the Cheryl Ladd's belly button isn't

firm. It's just nonexistent. Certainly not an iron girder. So there's this really great story about jellyfish and just how quickly they can take over, right? In the Black Sea, when a ship releases its cargo. Is it off the coast of Germany? Yeah. No.

That's the north in the Baltic. Oh, okay. Don't try and screw me up here. Sorry. This is the Black Sea, where they make caviar, right? And actually there are some, like entire national economies are based on things like caviar and sardines and anchovies and just all these amazing fish. Oh, wow.

And this ship apparently took on some seawater after it released its cargo to keep itself stable. Yeah. And when it got to the Black Sea, it released it. And one of the things it released was this type of jellyfish called the seawall nut. And this is in 1982. It sounds cute. So the first seawall nut makes its way into the Black Sea in 1982.

In 2002, the total biomass of seawall nuts in the Black Sea, just the Black Sea, was 10 times the total biomass of all the fish that were taken from the world's oceans by commercial fishing. Wow. It got jelly-fied, basically. Holy cow. Yeah. And they were competing with the other fish for the zoo plankton and the food source and

winning big time. And so all these fisheries collapsed, all these economies were in trouble. And then it just so happened that some other ship had picked up a different type of jellyfish that actually was a natural predator of the seawall nut and came along and saved the day totally by a stroke of luck. The seawall nut cracker. Yeah. Wow.

Yep. I did see that actually. You sent me that. That's amazing. Yep. So it all worked out. Everything about jellyfish is amazing. Yeah.

Final score for me, octopus 100, jellyfish 97. Oh, that is close. It is. Nice. I could have won it. But it didn't. Nope. It rimmed out.

So if you want to know more, you got anything else? Nope. You want to know more about jellyfish and comb jellies and that kind of stuff? You can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. That's right, it's 3 p.m., which means our bedtime is just in about four short hours. I actually tried to go to bed before my one-year-old daughter the other night. Yeah.

And I said, no, that's bad parenting. Sure. You just put yourself to bed. Oh, wait. And she finally drifted off at like 8.30, and I was out at 8.32. Nice. All right. I'm going to call this.

You helped me get married. Hey, guys. I recently got married to my beautiful wife. Congratulations. With whom I've been with for over eight years, while the prospect of being married to her never frightened me at all, the thought of having to be in the center of attention professing my love to my then-fiancee in front of all of our guests and try not to look like a dummy during the ceremony was, how do you say, nauseatingly frightening, terrifying, excuse me.

Yeah. Stephen was not, he's not a public speaker, I don't think. Got you. However, during the hours leading up to the ceremony, I kept my mind occupied by listening to the melodious tones of your voices teaching me about, well, some things. I really don't remember, honestly, I was a little occupied. So we were literally just like, what is it called, ASMR? Yeah.

Just these tones. He didn't even know what we were talking about. It was just the sounds of our voices soothed him, which is very nice. Yeah, it is nice. Regardless, guys, everything ultimately went very well, and we are both now very happy to be together for good and to not have to plan a wedding again. Thank you for helping me get through the worst of my pre-wedding anxiety, if I can say the worst day of my life at first, and for making such a terrific podcast, and that is Stephen

Hall, who's a PhD candidate in pharmacology. Well, thanks a lot, Stephen. Yeah. Congratulations. Send us some Moz Annex. Puppet in the mail. He's a candidate, a PhD candidate, he doesn't have access to that kind of stuff. Well, I guarantee you, he won't be a candidate anymore if he starts sending us animals.

Start mailing people pharmaceuticals. Don't give him his badge. Stephen, don't listen to Chuck. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason whatsoever, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.