Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Jellyfish - Even Cooler Than Octopi?

Episode Date: January 11, 2020

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 in this classic episode! 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

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, everyone. It's October 23rd, 2016. What? No, but this is Chuck from The Future Past, telling you to listen to the selects pick for the week,

jellyfish, colon, even cooler than the octopi? You decide. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] 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 lagged. I just was explaining off mic that my body is at 4.30 or 5.00 every morning. It says, get up, dummy. It's 10.15, 11. Yeah. And I go, no, it's not. It's dark.

No, it's 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 something. You're just like cooking in a wok, and you just fall face forward into it. 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... Well, I didn't say fondue. That should have.

You're having a fondue party. 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 just because you think it'd be fun to have a fondue party, don't buy one new. Just go to Goodwill.

Kill one, sure, yeah. Buy one for like $3. Yeah, you mean I have an unused one? Sure. Is it pea green? No, 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 tell you what I am excited about though. Jellyfish? Yeah, this is now officially my second favorite seafaring creature.

After octopus? Yeah. For sure, 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? Look, what about 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 Rocky the squirrel. Now I'm a Roman soldier.

Now I'm a cornucopia of vegetables in 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, we'll see. It's amazing. So when you're talking about jellyfish, a lot of people say, well, there's jellyfish, that's a jellyfish, that's a jellyfish. That lady walking down the street with a leash, got a jellyfish on the end of it. Right, and you would say jellyfish, jellyfish,

comb jelly, dog. Right, or 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, 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 debate. It depends on where you are. Among like 50 people. If you're in the jellyfish department of some, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I'll bet it gets nuts. Little vigorous.

They down some old English 40 malt liquor and argue. And 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. They're 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. No. That's their logo. There's, that 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 reread. Actually, it's called They're Taking Over. And it was a 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. Yeah. Don't think too. Don't overthink it. Yeah, that was early science. Right. 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? 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.

You know? 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 call that literally like a body hole or something? Yeah, it's a pretty basic organism, but it does a lot of things. So it's not, yeah, 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, they don't need 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 that 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. 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.

Yeah. You think about it, but I mean, like 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. Okay. Some types of jellies, box jellies in particular.

Yeah. Box jellyfish have eyes. Yeah. 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 like Cheryl Ladd, and you like 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, it's concentration of nerves,

basically that they haven't figured out yet, but they think that's like, therein is the secret. Right. Like it'd be like, I can't come up with a good analogy. There's a million of them out there, but I'm not, I still jet lagged, I guess. You'll think of one.

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, they're named for these cilia, these giant few cilia. There's eight rows up and down their bodies,

and they basically are their ways of locomoting. They have 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 like kind 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? Mm-hmm. That's the Medusa form. Pretty neat. 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 whole 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. Right. 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. 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 and you think, that's an amazing plant. That'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. If there's one called the lion's mane jellyfish, which on the whole, across like the whole species. Yeah. 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. This 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 it 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,

or what we think of as the true jelly, the Medusa that we know and love. And within that, there are quite a few different types, one of which is the Schifozoa. And this is the most common true jellyfish that you can imagine. When you picture jellyfish in your mind, you're probably thinking of the Schifozoa.

Right. The Hydrozoa are. Impostors. Well, they're the ones who, they spend most of their time as polyps, right? So the Schifozoa spend most of their time in the Medusa phase. Yeah.

The Hydrozoa 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.

Okay. So that is actually not a true jellyfish. It's actually a collection. 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, but they're actually a colony. Does that make sense?

Like imagine if your organs were various actual organisms 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 of jellyfish of any animal on the planet. 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. So they're the most deadly. And they're looking at you. Yeah. They're saying, I'm coming for you. The Star-Ozoa 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 are 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. Wow. And we should say also with jellyfish locomotion, they don't use the ciliae 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 like, 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 incredibly efficient type of animal. Without a brain, they're pretty smart. Yep, you know what I mean? Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break and we're gonna come back and dive into

the wonderful world of comb jellies. ["The Cone Jellyfish"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-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. 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?

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All right. So we talked about just a few of the standard jellyfish. 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 150,150. 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 yeah, 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.

And 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. See, I 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.

That'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 drunken argument going on among scientists. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium. How closely related they are. They used to all be described as selenirata. Which is hollow bellied. Oh, yeah.

Makes sense. But they don't say that anymore. Not in these PC times. Man, if you want to be ridiculed by your peers, call them that. But some people say, you know, they're sister groups. Some people say, nope, they're not even that closely related to the debate ranges on, I guess.

Yep. So what's interesting is that we even know how long jellies have been around, because 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. 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. It was something. A lot of pressure, I would think. But all of a sudden, it just captured it, because 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 comb jellies

were, it's possible they were the earliest animals to branch off 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 mussels 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? Yeah. 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 don't 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. Yeah.

There's the sunfish loves them. Well, other back 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, there's apparently a wedding delicacy in China. And has been for about 1,500, 1,600 years.

Ours is catered salmon in 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? Big Jim's jellies?

Preserved in moonshine. You totally eat jellyfish, wouldn't you? Sure, I would try it. Apparently, it's also 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. You just cry while you eat. Yeah, exactly. 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 what they said, it depends on who you talk to.

Some people are saying, no, they just realize that no one's ever done a scientific study to back up that flossing is good for you. And other people are saying, 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. OK, all right. But the idea that getting rotting food out from between your teeth has no positive health benefits for you, it defies explanation. Agreed. It was on stage because I made a crack about missing my teeth. Oh, yeah.

I remember now. As far as them feeding on other things, we talked about these tentacles that they have to capture prey. Yeah. 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 frightening. Yeah, 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. So there's the sea wasp, obviously, which has the most toxic venom on Earth

as far as humans are concerned. 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.

Yeah, it's called iriconji. Yeah, which is an aboriginal word. Yeah. For this type of jellyfish, right? There was 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, we did. And he did. 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 iriconji. Is that how we agreed we were going to say it? Yeah, iriconji. Iriconji. So this guy survived, but he, not well, where 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 iriconji 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, I tweaked my back out there in the ocean, and then things really start going south. Yeah, then you go, blah, and throw up your right kidney. Yeah, and this article you said, it feels like someone hits you with a baseball bat in 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's 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 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. Jeez. 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. They've actually found that it 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 its tentacle hits you and you're stung by a nematocyst,

there may be some 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, right?

So if you change that concentration by hitting it with fresh water, you're going to set them off. Yeah, they say you see water, right? You see water because they're held in check in seawater normally. So you see water to wash it off, and then you take a credit card and scrape the rest of them off. Yeah, or there's some kind of, if you don't have your credit

card on you, fear not. But supposedly you're supposed to keep sand out of it, which is tough to do. I did a don't be dumb on it years back. Oh, really? 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, 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. 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 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. MUSIC 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 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. 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. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

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. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ooh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ahh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah All right, so I promised talk of defense, um, these things, you've probably seen jelly fish and comb jellies that produced 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 all 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 up someone trying to eat you by turning a light on in their face yeah or turning a line

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 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 or there's no light yeah you'd think it would be black but they say that the red is easier to produce than right exactly so black would work it's just you try making black pigment you know yeah you can't no red and red's the same down there yeah it's all black it's all the same so um

some of them do that and then others have just red pigment in their gut right 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 jellies sexy time yeah so which is not very sexy no although it's like every kind of sex you can imagine jellyfish 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 spit them out of that mouth hole of theirs get some box wine right the party's 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 so the medusa 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 a lot of times all together there 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 that'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 through 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 one 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 because 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 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 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 i get the idea 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 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 it's called strobilation uh 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 yeah 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 right and then each one just 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 turitopsis

this 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 turitopsis 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 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 forms what else does it okay um it's great that these

things are uh proliferating like other species that aren't but it can get out of hand it can interfere with people it can interfere with machinery at power plants on the coast yeah cause power outages outages fisheries yeah 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 this stuff happening over time like they shut down the uss ronald reagan once which is a nuclear powered warship yeah because it got a bunch of jellyfish got sucked up into the cooling system um they shut down power plants in india in japan in the philippines yeah um and they think there's 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 right 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 uh overfishing basically just less competition for food uh they they're eating this zoo plankton and if other fish that normally eat that aren't there then the jellyfish like sweet more for me big buffet open apparently jellyfish do are not known to um go on diets they just gorge themselves constantly really yeah what else nutrients yeah when we uh when we release fertilizers from cropland

into areas where jellyfish live we can cause algae 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 a bunch of zoo plankton and phytoplankton which um well i guess they're eating the zoo plankton 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 start to get the idea why these things have been

around for 500 to 700 million years yeah they can 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 that how jellyfish reproduce in warmer water and also water that's of higher acidity which they're predicting through ocean acidification um 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 uh and then finally uh what they call uh ocean sprawl um is you know we're building things out in the middle of the ocean now uh 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 shero lads belly button is not the easiest thing to attach to oh shero lab was born without a belly button it's a claim to fame that was very insensitive of me you just threw me there sorry so uh what they do love to attach to is something solid so they love um they love attaching onto the ocean sprawl yeah and oil rigs and whatever else is out there and they do very well attached to a firm uh not the shero lads belly button isn't firm it's just

nonexistent certainly not an iron girder so um there's this really great story about jellyfish and just how quickly they can take over yeah right um in the black sea uh when a ship releases its cargo is it off the coast of germany yeah no that's the north and the baltic oh okay don't try and screw me up here sorry this is the black sea where they make caviar right um 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 was

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 wow it got jelly-fied basically holy cow yeah and they were competing with um the these the other fish for the zoo plankton and the food source and winning big time yeah 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 yeah i did see that actually you sent me that that's amazing yeah 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 just one three-pointer at the end could have won it but it didn't nope it it rimmed out so uh 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 uh since i said search bar it's time for listener mail it's right it's 3 p.m which means uh our bedtime is just in about four short hours yeah um i actually tried to go to bed before my one-year-old daughter the other night yeah

and i said no but that's bad parenting sure you just uh so you put yourself to bed oh wait and she finally drifted off at like 8 30 and i was out at 8 32 nice um all right i'm gonna call this uh you help me get married hey guys so recently got married to my beautiful wife congratulations uh with whom i've been with for over eight years uh 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 fiance 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 um yeah steven was not he's not a public speaker i don't think gotcha uh 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 uh regardless guys everything ultimately went very well and we are both now very happy to be together for good and uh to not have to plan a wedding again thank you for helping me get through the worst of my pre-wedding anxiety i thought he was gonna say the worst day of my life at first and for making such a terrific

podcast and that is steven hall who's a phd candidate in pharmacology well thanks a lot steven yeah congratulations send us some moz annex pop it 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 mailing people pharmaceutical give him his badge steven 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 stuff you should know you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at home on the web stuffyoushouldknow.com stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works for more podcasts

from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows 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 iHeartRadio 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 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