Mediterranean jellies.

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In browsing through my photo library, I stumbled on pictures from my last trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium of a jellyfish I haven't blogged yet, the Mediterranean jelly (Cotylorhiza tuberculata). I consulted the Monterey Bay Aquarium Online Field Guide and discovered that it isn't listed.

That hardly seems fair!

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Luckily, Wikipedia comes through in the clutch.

Cotylorhiza tuberculata is sometimes called the fried egg jelly, a name that didn't make a lot of sense to me.

Do you eat many fried eggs with dangly purple bits? Me neither.

If anything, these jellies put me in mind of bubbles from over-enthusiastic champagne bottles.

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Looking more closely at the dome end of the jellies, though, I can kind of see the yolk-like middle and the egg white ridge around it. I don't know why the dome should be prioritized over the arms in coming up with a fanciful name, though.

Unlike moon jellies, which can just hang in the water or seem to move in slow-motion, Mediterranean jellies zip around a tank like nobody's business. It turns out that they're one of a small number of jellyfish species that can move autonomously rather than having to wait around for the currents to carry them.

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Most jellyfish I've encountered in the wild were ones that beached, and of those you really only see the top part, so I can imagine how they would be named after the dome.

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