JELLYFISH don’t just drift about waiting for food. Mario Tamburri and his
team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California have proved
for the first time that these creatures use smell to help capture prey.
Working with a remotely operated vehicle in open water, they wafted the scent
of shrimp towards individual Mitrocoma cellularia. The jellyfish
reached out their tentacles towards the scent to try to capture the “shrimp”
(Limnology and Oceanography, vol 45, p 1661).
