9/27/14: Monterey Bay Aquarium, The Jellies Experience (Birthday Trip Part Six)

I think jellyfishes are one of the most fascinating creatures on Earth, inherently gorgeous and beautiful. A friend from class described them as "therapeutic" and I would have to agree.

I cannot express how much I enjoyed these Sea Nettles. There was a lot of them in each tank and I think I spent the most time just standing there and watching them move.

I promised myself that I will someday get rich and have a huge jellyfish tank as a bedroom wall.

However, these beautiful creatures are one of the dangerous ones. Their frilly tentacles are basically "mouth-arms" that are covered with stinging cells used to paralyze the prey and bring it closer to the mouth. Well, I was glad I was outside the tank. Haha.

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These ones are called Moon Jellies. Judging on their color, it seems that the aquarium feeds them crustaceans. 

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This one is a Crystal Jelly. They're really small and I'm lucky I got a decent photo of it. They're very luminous thanks to their tiny light-producing organs that light up their outer bell.

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Aside from the jellyfish exhibits in the general area, the Monterey Bay Aquarium also had this separate exhibit featuring only jellyfishes, The Jellies Experience! I don't know if this is a permanent thing but I definitely felt very lucky to be there while an exhibit like this was going on.

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If I'm not mistaken, this is a South American Sea Nettle. Monterey Bay Aquarium boasts to be the first one to display them!

See them for yourself with the Monterey Bay Aquarium live cam or you could check out my video below.

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These cute jellies are Spotted Jellies. I didn't witness it myself but apparently, small fishes sometimes hide in the bellies of these jellies to protect themselves from predators until they mature. 

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Speaking of cute and round jellies, here's some Blubber Jellies. Apparently, these ones are edible if dried and processed correctly. The Chinese believe that it helps lower high blood pressure.

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Not anemone, not corals. They're Upside-down Jellies! Ocean sunfishes eat these jellies. (We saw an ocean sunfish in the aquarium's Open Sea exhibit and our friend was right for describing it as a steak with a face. Haha. Unfortunately, I don't have any decent photo of the ocean sunfish to show you.)

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I didn't take notes on each and everything there so I had to look up the names of those I couldn't remember. This one probably took me the longest. At first, I thought it was a Sand Jelly but it's actually an Indonesian Sea Nettle. I really enjoyed watching these. They're so beautiful and elegant.

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Another stunning jellyfish is this Lion's Mane Jelly. They can grow very big up to eight feet in diameter and a hundred feet in length! I definitely want to see a jellyfish that big!

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Straying away from big jellies, here are some tiny Cross Jellies. Apparently, they grow up to four inches but these ones I've seen are baby-sized.

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What's this Pokémon?! It's not a Pokémon but a Lemon Jelly! When I saw the Monterey Bay Aquarium's monthly wallpaper of this, I thought we missed seeing it but when I went through my photos and videos, it seems that we actually did! It just looked slightly different in the well-taken photographs in the aquarium site. 

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These gare Flower Hat Jellies. They look really impressively glowy in the exhibit but I wish we saw them lit differently since they look gorgeous in photos I've seen online.

To be honest, I still couldn't believe what I saw there. If I ever had the opportunity to see something beautifully surreal in my childhood, I would've probably went to marine biology or something. In fact, everything we saw there was so unbelievable that this happened:

See this jelly?

This post took longer than expected because of all the video uploading and all but mostly because I needed to find out what each jellyfish was. I could not figure out what this one was that in my desperation, I tweeted the aquarium to find out.

I was so embarrassed! I don't know what possessed me to not realize that these were lamps. I completely forgot about it until the tweet confirmed that it wasn't even a living thing. I hope they didn't think that I was trying to prank them or anything. I was just tired, I guess. 

But let's not talk about that. I'm really amazed with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in every way. They're doing social media right! Nothing beats responsiveness and helpfulness. Thank you so much to the kind soul that paid attention to me! My next post which is going to be about the Tentacles exhibit will also be complete with the right names thanks to him/her! Thanks again and hope I'll be back soon!