It was when I was stroking the jellyfish that the thought crossed my mind that possibly not all life on this planet might necessarily have originated here.
We took Thomas to the Baltimore National Aquarium today. He was actually pretty excited about it, and kept saying “we’re going to see the fishies and the sharks with the big scary teeth!”
(Which we did. We saw many fishies and a number of sharks with big scary teeth, so all of his expectations were met today. Thanks Uncle Kellan!)
It was a little crowded and it’s a wee bit of a hike to get to the Aquarium, so we were only there for a few hours…much longer and we would have risked major toddler melt-down. I would have liked to have spent more time there, I think, but I was perfectly okay with leaving when we did. People (kids especially) are exhausting.
One of the cool things to do at the aquarium is the touch tanks, where you get to gently stroke a ray or a crab or whatever. One of the tanks contained a large number of Moon Jellyfish. We get large numbers of these strange creatures at Camp sometimes; usually washed up the Chesapeake Bay and in to the river by tidal or storm surges. I have always been wary of them, as I think that’s probably a healthy reaction to have to most jellyfish, but was intrigued at the prospect of being able to touch one, so I did.
As the name implies, it was a soft, yielding, jelly-like texture. Smooth, almost slimy but not quite. Not unpleasant but definitely unusual.
I was mostly taken aback by just how alien they are. Almost nothing on Earth is like it. Its body is almost entirely made of water, making it barely definable from the medium it exists in. It has no recognizable sensory organs, no respiratory or circulatory systems. Some species are even biologically immortal, capable of regressing to an immature state and starting over from scratch.
How strange life under the sea is. Horseshoe Crabs (which aren’t actually crabs) first evolved 450 million years ago and tend to swim upside down. Some octopus species can change the colour of their very cells at will. Mudskippers are fish that can walk around on land as long as they stay moist. An Electric Eel (which isn’t actually an eel) gives off small pulses of electricity to sense its surroundings. A Portuguese Man o’war isn’t a single creature but a colony of several symbiotic creatures living as one. (Also, despite appearances, not a jellyfish (which aren’t actually fish…you know, taxonomy is hard.)
Fish that swim upside down, fish that look like rocks, fish that have no eyes, fish that are transparent…it’s like evolution got to the ocean last, went “fuck it,” and just started making stuff up.
But you have to wonder if even Evolution was drunk enough to come up with Jellyfish. They are just so unreal that you can’t help but to wonder if they did somehow just wound up on Earth by accident.
We also saw some dolphins, which are their own kind of joke. Strong, streamlined, perfectly designed for mastery of the sea.
Breathes Air.
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Anatopism 