ALTHOUGH it resembles something worn on a catwalk, the flower hat jelly (Olindias formosus) is best kept well away from your head. This is because its colourful, gummy worm-like tentacles are far from sweet: the jelly uses these fluorescent-tipped tentacles to catch and kill small fish by paralysing them with venom.
If you collided with one of these animals while swimming in the waters off southern Japan, the venom would inflict a painful sting that could leave you with a rash. While rarely fatal to humans, the flower hat jelly is responsible for at least one death, in the 1970s.
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Despite looking like a jellyfish, the flower hat jelly belongs to a related but distinct class of animals, the Hydrozoa. Flower hat jellies are nocturnal, spending their days on or close to the sea floor. This makes them hard to observe, so we are still in the dark about their early life cycle. For example, we don’t know how they release sperm or eggs, or how these develop into larvae.
We do know the larvae attach to a solid surface and mature into stalk-like polyps with single tentacles resembling sea anemones, before budding into the jelly’s recognisable umbrella shape.
Photographer,
Tony Wu,
