The 3rd of November is World Jellyfish Day.
Happy #WorldJellyfishDay! 🎉
— The Wildlife Trusts (@WildlifeTrusts) November 3, 2023
Which jellyfish have you seen floating through our waters? 💙 https://t.co/JqaZmA5PA9 pic.twitter.com/SjBbkJLF8U
It's a special day to celebrate the mysterious creatures and think of ways to keep them safe all over the world.
These strange animals are made up of mostly water, have no centralised brains, blood or bones.
Conservationists are hoping to raise awareness of this unique creature for the role they play in the environment and their potential to help medical research or even be a sustainable food source.
And while you may think of the unusual sea creatures as mainly being far away from home, sightings of jellyfish in UK seas and on our beaches have gone up by 32% according to research done by the Marine Conservation Society.
Jellyfish were around before dinosaurs?
They've been around for more than 500 million years - scientists discovered this in 2005 when they found a 505-million-year-old jellyfish fossil.
Their mostly transparent bodies, wiry tentacles, and lack of bodily organs confounded early scientists so much that they couldn’t even classify these guys — back when categories were only plants, animals, and humans. Jellyfish weren’t plants but they didn’t fit the specified mold of animals either. The world simply dubbed (classified) them as ‘incomplete’ and didn’t bother investigating further, at least until the microscope was invented. Many such ‘incomplete’ organisms didn’t neatly fit into any category naturalists created, and they were forced to reexamine their categories and come up with new definitions for each.
However, it wasn’t until Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859 — “all living things show a variation in physical traits over time as a process of natural selection” — that the jellyfish got some recognition.
