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Cassiopea Jellyfish — printable fact sheet
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Cassiopea Jellyfish
Cassiopea spp.
Cassiopea lives upside down. It settles bell-down on the sediment of mangrove lagoons and seagrass flats and holds its frilled oral arms up toward the surface — and the reason is that it is farming. Its tissues are packed with symbiotic photosynthetic algae, and by lying on its …
Did you know?
- Cassiopea jellyfish can release tiny, stinging, mucus-filled bubbles into the water, which can cause mild discomfort to swimmers even without direct contact.
- In 2017, Cassiopea became the first animal without a centralised brain shown to sleep: it displays reduced pulsing at night, is slower to respond to stimuli, and shows a rebound of quiescence if kept awake — meeting the behavioural criteria for sleep in an animal that has only a diffuse nerve net. Its symbiotic algae make it a useful lab model for studying coral bleaching without needing coral. It can be so abundant in some lagoons that the seafloor appears carpeted in pulsing brown flowers.
What I learned
Draw the cassiopea jellyfish
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