Honor an Invert Day!

There is a lot of beauty in common animals, like the moon jelly, if people just take a look. I've noticed a lot of the non-scientific community tend to look down on inverts as somehow trivial or disgusting, but nothing could be further from the truth. The other thing is that a lot of people forget inverts. When many people think 'animal' they think 'spine'.

This particular photo is an old favorite of mine, taken at the Cabrillo Aquarium, and featured on the cover of my 2008 Beauty of Marine Invertebrates Calendar. Marine invertebrates are as beautiful as any land/ air invert, as delicate as dragonflies, as colorful as butterflies... yet they're often overlooked.

Sea Jellies are not fish, although commonly called "jellyfish". One common mistake people have is to assume that all sea animals are some kind of fish, while nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, fish make up only the tiniest portion of the living things in the sea. Sea Jellies, like the Moon Jelly, have been around a lot longer than fish have, and certainly a lot longer than human beings.

Moon Jellies don't simply grab food with their tentacles, as some might imagine. They often capture plankton on the mucus coated surface of their bells. Cilia move the food to the edge of the bell, where it is then passed to the conical manubrium (that frilly, lacy-looking area), before being passed to one of the four stomach pouches (seen as horseshoe shaped light areas on the photo above).


Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Cnidaria
Class: Scyphozoa
Order: Semaeostomeae
Family: Ulmaridae
Genus: Aurelia
species: Aurelia aurita


Life Photo Meme