Althouse: "I found a fish inside a jellyfish! He was trapped in there..."

June 7, 2016

"I found a fish inside a jellyfish! He was trapped in there..."

"... but controlled where the jellyfish was moving."

Photo at link.

12 comments:

David said...: Who is controlling whom? Always a tricky question.; 6/7/16, 5:06 PM
JPS said...: Is this a metaphor?; 6/7/16, 5:10 PM
traditionalguy said...: My bets on the Jellyfish. Those guys are billions of years old.; 6/7/16, 5:11 PM
Wince said...: With all this adverse publicity, how long before the jelly fish accuses the fish of rape?; 6/7/16, 5:20 PM
madAsHell said...: How does the fish breath? I'm thinking this won't end well for the fish.; 6/7/16, 6:01 PM
Ann Althouse said...: Will the fish be digested or will it live out its normal life, intra-jellyfish?; 6/7/16, 6:49 PM
Fritz said...: Dead fish swimming.; 6/7/16, 7:39 PM
Anonymous said...: I also liked the picture of the Canadian blue lobster, which can be seen by following one of the links in the article. It's unusual not only because of its blue color, but also because it's "right-handed," that is, the large claw (the crusher claw) is on the right. In most Atlantic/Maine lobsters it's on the left, i.e., typically the right claw is the "pincer" that holds the prey while the left claw is the "crusher" that kills it).; 6/7/16, 8:12 PM
Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...: JPS @ 5:10 "Is this a metaphor?"

Trump and the Media; 6/7/16, 9:08 PM
Quaestor said...: Will the fish be digested or will it live out its normal life, intra-jellyfish?

Something no one has considered is symbiosis. There are fish that live symbiotically with various cnidarians (the huge phylum that includes jellyfish, hydras, corals, etc.) The most familiar example is the Clown Fish, a popular aquarium pet, that lives in symbiosis with sea anemones. Normally jellyfish are predatory and some large ones can eat fish, though the size relationship between eater and eaten is typically much greater than the example of the photo. Digestion is extremely slow, however, which is why jellyfish have powerfully envenomed nematocysts which paralyze the prey so that they do not struggle and tear the jelly apart. The fish is paralyzed rather than killed because the digestion is so slow that normal bacterial decomposition is faster than the jellyfish's own digestive processes. Rather than feed the bacteria the jelly keeps its catch alive as long as possible. (Being slowly digested to death is not a nice prospect, but that is the nature of nature. Yet the hipster romanticism that dominates our confused and reality-defying culture can't handle the truth about anything, it seems.)

The fact that the fish is able to swim and direct the jellyfish that contains it strongly suggests symbiosis ("scared-looking"? Break me a fucking give.) Jellies have only limited mobility, most just float with the current. A cnidarian that developed a protective relationship with a fish in exchange for mobility would enjoy a real advantage over other jellies of similar size.; 6/8/16, 7:41 AM
Quaestor said...: My bets on the Jellyfish. Those guys are billions of years old.

600 million on the outside. There are no cnidarian fossils in the Ediacaran biota (565 million years ago) so it isn't billions. But we live in the age of Obamanomics where the distinctions of scale don't count.; 6/8/16, 7:52 AM
Todd said...: "Scared looking fish" really? How does a fish "look" scared? How does anyone know if that fish is actually scared or not? It might be perfectly content inside of that jellyfish.

Generally there is this need to "humanize" non-human things and to assign human motivations, emotions, and reactions to non-human things. It is generally a sign of a lazy mind.

As he describes the fish as "swimming" versus "thrashing", that would indicate that the fish was not yet in any distress. It still may get consumed by the jellyfish but that process is either occurring so slowly as to not alarm the fish or had not yet begun.; 6/8/16, 9:25 AM