'moon jelly'

Aurelia aurita

Guardian: Maria Winters

If you were a small planktonic animal you might think you had escaped death by swimming away from the tentacles to the top of the moon jelly, but then it would contract its muscles and create a ‘flow vortex’ that would suck you over the bell and spiral you underneath it. There you would get stuck in a mucous sea and slowly that sea would, pushed by hundreds of little hairs (cilia), drift towards the stinging tentacles at the edge of the jellyfish. Once stung to death you would then be deposited in its stomach.