In defense of jellyfish

When my little brother and I spent summers on Monhegan as children, we played in the tidal pools on the back side of the island. At low tide, we hunted for crabs and mollusks entranced by the brilliant colors of barnacles, urchins, fish, and other sea creatures, but we also collected jellyfish that had been washed up by the tide. These moon jellies looked so forlorn that we carefully returned these translucent creatures to the ocean.

As a fisherman’s wife, I went to sea with my husband to bait the traps he hauled by hand. I shuddered every single time I boiled a lobster, attempting to kill the creature mercifully by sticking each frantic antennaed, beady-eyed crustacean in boiling water by its head.

Often, blackfish (pilot whales/dolphins) swam around us in the deep waters, and some days, when we idled the boat to eat lunch, a whale would come alongside. I could bend over the gunwales to touch these gentle giants whose skin felt like coarse velvet (most were humpbacks). Whenever one of these animals peered into my face with one giant marbled eye, I was swept away by the sense of an incredible intelligence as well as the obvious fact that these creatures really enjoyed our company at sea.

On calm days, I loved to sit on the stern during breaks to watch the moon jellies as they floated upon the water. They bobbed up and down as they fed just beneath the surface of each swell with such gently pulsing movements that the effect was mesmerizing. I never tired of watching this show.

Recently, I read about Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that inhabits the northwest coastal waters, that brought these memories into sharp relief. Aequorea (Aeq – my abbreviation) is a species of bioluminescent jellyfish that glows green in the dark. This bioluminescence became critically important to scientists, who, among other things, were and are continuing to study the ways different plants respond to being touched or wounded.

They combine the DNA that codes for the green fluorescent protein (GFP) belonging to Aequorea with the chromosome of the plant – this DNA becomes part of the organism and is passed on to the next generation. After the gene is inserted into the chromosome, it duplicates itself in every cell and its offspring. Every plant from then on will have that gene that turns a plant or person luminous green!

This is how scientists learned that whenever a plant is touched it sends electrical signals throughout the rest of its body, visible as a luminescent green. One leaf communicates to the rest of the plant in seconds that something is happening. Wounding a plant produces the most stunning bioluminescence.

Because I was so fascinated by what I was learning, it only gradually occurred to me that Aeq. had to be killed to get GFP into any plant.

Immediately, I experienced deep distress as memories of caring about moon jellyfish surfaced. I did further research on the species, discovering that more than ten million of these jellyfish were ‘harvested’ between the 60s and 80s. At some point, the killing stopped, probably because RNA replaces DNA as a carrier of genetic information.

Animals and plants are fine to use for testing, but ethically, we have sanctions against using humans for this purpose. Why? Animals, trees, and plants aren’t that important to many. Of course, there are scientists and naturalists like me who have been privileged to enter the rest of the natural world as learners to study nature with some awareness of her sentience and complexity.

Conservative materialistic science dismisses sentience (feeling, sensing, awareness) in all biological species but humans, even though more and more scientific evidence is accumulating for ‘more than human’ intelligences.

For now, my fervent hope is that someday we will extend our ethical vision to include other than human species. Perhaps considering that other creatures with or without a brain, like butterflies and fireflies, trees and plants, jellyfish and slime molds, might have lives that are as important to them as ours are to us might also help us develop compassion and humility for the ‘Other’, those that are different from ourselves, human or otherwise.