The Thing About Jellyfish: Part 3

Your background provides the context for your scientific quest.

There have been five mass extinctions since jellyfish showed up on the scene. One of those extinctions, the Great Dying, killed off nine out of ten species on Earth.

Everything else is just gone, poof, their cages forever barren.

Here’s a calculation: If all the time that’s passed since jellyfish showed up were compressed into a single eighty-year life-span, three billion heartbeats, humans would appear on the scene only during the person’s final ten days on Earth—the last million heartbeats or so.

“Well, I want you to know,” she continued, as if I’d answered her, “everybody grieves in different ways. There’s not a right way or a wrong way to grieve for someone you loved.”

I once saw a man with devil horns surgically implanted in his head and tattoos all over his face.

His travel involves something called systems checks, which sounds kind of tedious to me.

For the most part, it was a lot of the same kids I knew from previous years: wretched Dylan Parker and messy-always-messing-up Justin Maloney.

I tried feeling those atoms, tried to sense if there was anything inside me that might inspire me to burst out with To be, or not to be or Wherefore art thou, but I couldn’t.

Past students, she explained, had studied orcas, diabetes, astronaut food, the Black Death, velociraptors, solar hurricanes, and bioterrorism.

Dad made a grumpy face. “Okay, Suzy,” he said. He sounded exasperated. “You just let me know when you’re ready to make conversation.”

He discovered a never-before-seen jellyfish in the darkest part of the ocean. It had a red part inside the bell that could crumple or expand, just like a folding paper lantern. Named it the Paper Lantern jellyfish. I like how literal that is.

Writes haiku poetry about things he sees.

Here is one:
soap bubbles
westward to nirvana each
carrying nothing

On the day after our aquarium visit, we walked into Mrs. Turton’s classroom and saw a quote on the blackboard: a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I stared at the image on the screen. Earth looked alive, vibrant. The moon was desolate and gray by comparison.

I stared at the image on the screen. Earth looked alive, vibrant. The moon was desolate and gray by comparison.

Here I was, just one out of seven billion people, and people were just one species out of ten million, and those ten million were just a tiny fraction of all the species that ever existed, and somehow all of us fit onto that fleck of brown dust on the screen.

I searched his face for any kind of sarcasm, but he looked genuine.

I searched his face for any kind of sarcasm, but he looked genuine.

She looked at me intently. “Do you understand?”

We remembered that Magellan circumnavigated the world by thinking of him as Ma-Jell-O; his body just wiggled and jiggled all over the globe.

To remember Captain James Cook, who sailed to Australia, we just needed to remember him as the cook in a restaurant that catered exclusively to koalas and kangaroos.

To remember Captain James Cook, who sailed to Australia, we just needed to remember him as the cook in a restaurant that catered exclusively to koalas and kangaroos.

There is a knock on the door, and before we can scramble off the bed, your mom pops her head in.

There were NASA engineers who studied jellies’ jet propulsion.

There were researchers who studied jellyfish anatomy. Ecology. Evolution.

There were researchers who studied jellyfish anatomy. Ecology. Evolution.

Advantages:
- Firsthand expertise with stings.
- Looks tough.

She didn’t even wince.

I knew how it felt to inflict pain, then stand there and watch.

In the first video I saw him in, Jamie jumped into water that was swarming with deadly jellyfish—I’m talking about jellyfish that could kill him in three minutes flat—like it was nothing at all.

All casual, he told a TV reporter that the jellyfish he was holding contained enough venom to kill fifteen humans.

The reporter tried to smile nonchalantly.

After Jamie was stung, he writhed in pain for two full days, which is almost three thousand minutes.