A Japanese and Brazilian team of scientists found a funky new jellyfish with a distinguishing mark. The St. George’s cross medusa (Santjordia pagesi or S. pagesi) is a new medusa jellyfish species that was found about 2,664 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean. It lives in a deep-sea volcanic structure called the Sumisu Caldera. This hot, hydrothermally active caldera is about six miles across and is located off the coast of Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, about 285 miles south of the capital city of Tokyo. The findings are described in a study published in November the journal Zootaxa.
[Related: Even without brains, jellyfish learn from their mistakes.]
Protecting its snacks–with a shield and 240 tentacles
The St. George’s Cross medusa is considered fairly large for a jellyfish, at about four inches wide and three inches long. It also boasts roughly 240 tentacles. It gets its name from a cross shape on its body when viewed from above that resembles the red Cross of St. George on the English flag.
It is a type of jellyfish called a medusa (or the plural form, medusae), which are free-swimming jellyfish that are shaped like an umbrella and have a reduced stalk.
“The species is very different from all the deep-sea medusae discovered to date. It’s relatively small, whereas others in this kind of environment are much larger. The bright red coloring of its stomach probably has to do with capturing food,” André Morandini, a study co-author and biologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, said in a statement.
Like all jellyfish, S. pagesi is transparent. It also eats other bioluminescent organisms in the deep sea that give off light. The team believes that its bright red stomach acts like a shield to hide its prey. This way, other…
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