Crystal Jellyfish

The Crystal Jelly (Aequorea victoria), is a bioluminescent hydrozoan jellyfish, or hydromedusa. From the Bering Sea to southern California, they can be found along the Pacific Ocean's west coast of North America. The pelagic organism that makes up the medusa portion of the life cycle budded off a bottom-dwelling polyp in late spring. In the eastern Pacific Ocean, medusae can be found floating and swimming both close to shore and offshore; this species is particularly prevalent in Puget Sound.

They have a nearly totally transparent and colorless body, a strongly contractile mouth, and a manubrium at the center of up to 100 radial canals that extend to the bell border. Up to 150 unequal tentacles encircle the bell border in fully-grown specimens. Nematocysts found in the tentacles help capture prey, but they have little impact on people. The gonads for sexual reproduction are often present in specimens larger than 3 cm; they span the majority of the radial canals and may be seen in the images on this page as whitish thickenings.