Flower Hat Jelly

Names & Nicknames: Flower hat jelly, or sometimes flower hat jellyfish. (Although, scandal, they’re not actually jellyfish.)

Size: When flower hat jellies are first observed at the beginning of their lifecycle, usually around December (festive flowers) they're only 2cm long, just a bit bigger than your fingernail. A few months later, when they're fully grown (depending on how many snacks they're lucky enough to eat), they're over 10 times longer and 15cm tall – like a large orange with tentacles.

Communication: What would life look like without talking? Peaceful? Lonely? Flower hat jellies may well know the answer, as they're found not to communicate with each other. They do, however, have a few tricks up their sleeves to lure in prey, like fluorescent tips to their stinging tentacles, which passing snacks may mistake for a tasty piece of algae. Deadly jelly disco ball glow sticks. (New band name?)

Favourite Hangout: Flower hat jellies like to kick it by the coasts, specifically southern Japan, Brazil, and Argentina. They're a semi-benthic species, meaning they spend some of their time on the sea floor and some in open water. They especially like to hang out near kelp and seagrass.

Favourite Snack: The flower hat jelly looks mesmerising but has a deadly touch – an impressive array of tentacles covered in stinging cells called nematocysts. These stingers can give us a nasty rash and are much more lethal to small fish, plankton, and other suitably sized organisms that wander into these deadly tendrils.

Eating Habits: Midnight munchies ever taken you for a little wander? During the day, these jellies spend their time chilling near the seafloor, but at night, when hunger hits, it's time to hunt. They'll float higher towards the surface, hoping to snag some tasty snacks with their toxic touch.

Toilet Humour: Flower hat jellies (like other jellies and jellyfish) are huge fans of efficiency. They have a single orifice that acts as their mouth and also their anus, a real 2-4-1.

Love Language: Not exactly a bunch of Romeos and Juliets; little is actually known about flower hat reproduction. We do know that it happens at a distance, so sperm and eggs will be released by adult flower hats to fertilise each other on the waves. Intimate, right?

If you see them: Look; don’t touch! Watch their mesmerising array of tentacles and colours but don't get lured in close like a small fish might. Although rarely fatal to humans, they can still give a very painful and nasty sting. If you do get stung please don't pee on it… that’s just an old wives tale.

Red Flags: For the moment they seem to be doing okay, though not much is known about their population and they're not evaluated by the IUCN. Like the rest of our fragile ocean ecosystems, they're likely still threatened by things such as climate change.

Epic Journeys: Whilst it is true that flower hat jellies like to go with the flow, they do have some say in which way the flow is. By contracting their muscles, they can squirt water in the opposite direction from where they want to go, like a little underwater rocketship with boosters.

Glow-up: Flower hat jellies don't start life as their colourful, flamBOYANT selves. They start as eggs and sperm, floating blissfully on the currents, coming together to fertilise and become tiny larvae that will then find a hard surface to settle on. After settling, these larvae (now called polyps) will extend one long tentacle to catch tiny prey floating in the water, like plankton, to keep them fed as they grow. The next stage of jelly life, called a medusae, sees them spawn from a polyp into a tiny baby flower hat. They will continue to slowly grow into the beautiful creatures that entertained Mo Hart and Heidi N Closet.

Facts: They helped treat people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research found these valiant jellies contained fluorescent proteins that slowed down the COVID-19 virus and prevented it from continuing to attack a human's immune system. Another unsung hero in nature.

Who are they in the friendship group: Floaty, happy bobbing through life, but you know they have a sting up their sleeve.