Random Reasons the Lion's Mane Jellyfish Is One of the Ocean's Weirdest Creatures (12 items)

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  (#10) And You Thought All Animals Needed Eyes

  This giant jellyfish decided to never evolve eyes onto its globule head thing. Instead, they're able to detect light and dark but no shapes or colors. When you live at the bottom of the sea you don't really need eyes, although it would be very cute if giant jellyfish had to go around wearing swim goggles. 
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  (#7) Lion's Mane Jellyfish Are Closer to Benedict Cumberbatch Than You'll Ever Be

  Leave it to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to be ahead of the curve when it comes to writing about cool fish, jelly or otherwise. Ya boy Lion's Mane appears in the Sherlock Holmes short story The Adventure of the Lion's Mane, and it's discovered at the end of the story that the stone cold killer of a professor who died while swimming and shouting "the lion's mane!" was actually killed by a jellyfish and not a lion, or whatever. 
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  (#5) Let's Talk About Sex (Jelly) Baby

  Lion's mane jellyfish have pushed aside the entire need for a mate to help with procreation. This mammoth of a sea creature carries both eggs and sperm. Once an egg is fertilized, the female of the species carries it on its tentacles until they develop into larvae. At maturation the larvae are deposited onto a hard surface and become polyps, then the polyps transform into stacks of smaller creatures - which is insane - and grow into a living jellyfish. That's incredibly unsettling.  
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  (#1) A Lion's Mane Jellyfish Is SO Big

  HOW BIG IS IT? Well, a belly of these particular jellyfish grow to be eight feet wide, and its tentacles reach out to be 120 feet long. Impressive. That's longer than the entire length of a blue whale, one of the largest creatures in the ocean. 
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  (#8) These Fish Have Benefitted from Overfishing

  Unless you're some kind of nut you know the ocean is not only heating up, it's also being overfished, and one of the few things benefiting from this catastrophic event is the lion's mane jellyfish. These monsters of the sea actually thrive in areas that have been wrecked by humans and climate change. Not only has climate change killed off their predators, but it has promoted more jellyfish swarms. So if nothing else we can look out for melting polar ice caps and an ocean full of stinging sea monsters. 
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  (#9) They're One of the Oldest Living Species - Older Even Than Dinosaurs

  It turns out that lion's mane jellyfish have been hanging around the ocean longer than the dinosaurs. They've been floating around the ocean for 650 million years. It's likely they haven't changed much since they were birthed from the gross ectogoo that life sprung from. Yum. 

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