{"id":1081,"date":"2010-12-10T12:48:09","date_gmt":"2010-12-10T16:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/?p=1081"},"modified":"2010-12-10T12:52:30","modified_gmt":"2010-12-10T16:52:30","slug":"why-i-dont-go-into-the-water-jellyfish-with-both-medusa-and-gigantica-in-the-latin-names-should-be-avoided-on-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/2010\/12\/10\/why-i-dont-go-into-the-water-jellyfish-with-both-medusa-and-gigantica-in-the-latin-names-should-be-avoided-on-principle\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I don’t go into the water: Jellyfish with both “medusa” and “gigantica” in their Latin names should be avoided on principle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a lot of pics of giant Jellyfish lately, mostly these Nomura’s jellyfish<\/a> who inhabit the Sea of Japan like Godzilla’s own colon polyps. I fear them, of course, but I admit to cheering for them as they sank a Japanese trawler last year<\/a>…nobody was hurt. <\/p>\n

But looking up info on oarfish, I came across Mark Benfield<\/a>‘s work at Louisiana State University. He’s working with oil and gas industry ROVs<\/a> — submersible robots — to study wildlife. Hey, its the least the industry could do. No, seriously, the very least<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Last spring, Benfield published the first account<\/a> of Stygiomedusa gigantea<\/em>, a giant jellyfish, in the Gulf of Mexico. They aren’t trawler-eating big, but they are still fairly huge. They are apparently fond of grabbing onto underwater structures — such as pipelines or oil rigs — to use as a base for feeding. See, the oil industry is providing a valuable service!<\/p>\n

Discover Magazine interviewed Benfield last month. Cool, shudder-inducing vid:<\/p>\n

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I’ve seen a lot of pics of giant Jellyfish lately, mostly these Nomura’s jellyfish who inhabit the Sea of Japan like Godzilla’s own colon polyps. I fear them, of course, but I admit to cheering for them as they sank a Japanese trawler last year…nobody was hurt. But looking up info on oarfish, I came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[115,18,8],"tags":[103,69],"class_list":["post-1081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dont-go-in-the-water","category-science-fandom","category-sciencegeek-porn","tag-jellyfish","tag-why-i-dont-go-in-the-water","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7V2xo-hr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1084,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions\/1084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}