The Differences and Similarities Between Jellyfish and Comb Jellies

TLDR Jellyfish and comb jellies are often mistaken for each other, but they are actually distinct creatures. While jellyfish have venom-bearing harpoons and various defense mechanisms, comb jellies use sticky glue to capture prey.

Timestamped Summary

00:00 Jellyfish and comb jellies are often confused as being the same, but they are actually different creatures.
05:15 Jellyfish and comb jellies are closely related, but there is still debate among scientists about their exact relationship.
10:21 Some types of jellies, like box jellyfish, have eyes and retinas but no brain, and scientists are still trying to figure out how they process images and respond to them.
15:35 There are more than 10,000 species of jellyfish, but only about 4,000 are considered true jellyfish, and they can be divided into different types such as skifozoa, hydrazoa, and Cubazoa.
20:57 There are fewer species of comb jellies compared to jellyfish, but there may be more that we are not aware of, especially in deep sea waters where they are fragile and difficult to collect.
25:58 Jellyfish and comb jellies are found all over the oceans and there is ongoing debate among scientists about how closely related they are, but they have been around for at least 500 million years and may have branched off from the Tree of Life before sponges or fish.
31:15 Jellyfish have venom-bearing harpoons that they use to capture prey, and some species of jellyfish, like the iriconji, can be deadly to humans if stung.
35:57 Jellyfish and comb jellies have different methods of capturing prey, with jellyfish using venom-bearing harpoons and comb jellies using sticky glue to reel in their catch.
41:00 Jellyfish have various defense mechanisms, including bioluminescence and camouflage, and they reproduce through a variety of methods, including sexual reproduction, asexual reproduction, and strobilation in the polyp stage.
46:18 Jellyfish blooms can interfere with human activities, such as fishing and power plants, and there is debate over whether these blooms are a natural occurrence or a result of human factors like overfishing, nutrient runoff, and climate change.
51:38 In the Black Sea, a ship released a type of jellyfish called the seawall nut in 1982, and by 2002 the total biomass of seawall nuts in the Black Sea was ten times the total biomass of all the fish taken from the world's oceans by commercial fishing, causing fisheries to collapse and economies to suffer until another ship introduced a natural predator of the seawall nut and saved the day.
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