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Giant Jellyfish Lurks in Pacific
By Larry O'Hanlon, Animal Planet News
May 12, 2003 — Sea monsters still lurk off the coast of California, and the latest to come to the attention of marine biologists is a huge red jellyfish nicknamed Big Red.
The new jelly reaches a full meter in diameter and has only arms and no tentacles, making it a strange beast indeed. Not only is Big Red a new species, said jelly specialist George Matsumoto of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, but it's a new genus and subfamily as well.
"It's big and it's kind of amazing," said jelly expert Claudia Mills of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratory.
New jellies are discovered all the time, she told Discovery News, but not such big ones. Usually the big jellies are already known about because they are caught in fishing nets.
One thing Big Red has in common with other newly discovered jellies is that very little is known about its lifestyle and ecology. No one knows what it eats, what eats it, or anything else other than that it's also been caught on video tape at depths of 2,000 to 4,800 feet near the Hawaiian Islands, in the Gulf of California (a.k.a., the Sea of Cortez) and off Japan.
A possible reason Big Red has escaped identification so long, said Matsumoto, is that it looks somewhat like another smaller red jelly that is seen at such depths. It took Matsumoto and his colleague Kevin Raskoff some time studying a database of undersea videos to discover that Big Red was bigger and different and indeed being sighted in far-flung parts of the Pacific Ocean.
Big Red's missing tentacles also make it an oddity, said marine biologist Bill Hamner of the University of California at Los Angeles. It also has different numbers of arms on different individuals — something very rare in jellies, he said.
"It's very odd, actually," agreed Matsumoto. "Usually the number of arms is set."
Matsumoto hopes that by publishing a scientific paper about Big Red in the journal Marine Biology, other oceanographers and marine biologists will realize that they've seen other Big Reds — perhaps eating or doing something that reveals aspects of its lifestyle.
"My guess is that other people have seen it and we'll get some other responses," Matsumoto told Discovery News.
Big Red's scientific name is Tiburonia granrojo, after the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's remotely operated submarine vehicle "Tiburon" and the Spanish words for "big red."
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