Vocabulary
Swarms of jellyfish
What are smacks?
Nettle-like animals that possess a powerful sting. Jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals are examples of these creatures
What are cnidarians?
The outer layer of skin
What is epidermis?
Cnidarians that are zooplankton and do not swim but simply float in the water
What are jellyfish?
Large coral formations resulting from many corals gathered together building skeletons around themselves
What are coral reefs?
What we call a very large smack of jellyfish
What is Jellyfish Bloom?
An animal that attaches an anemone to each cheliped and walks around using the anemones to sting small animals in order to eat them. Allows the sea anemones to share the meal.
What is boxer crab?
The stinging cells of a cnidarian that typically cover each tentacle
What are nematocysts?
The poison in its nematocysts is strong enough to kill a person, but you can see by its boxy shape that it is not a true jellyfish.
What is the box jellyfish?
Corals that are soft and can be easily mistaken for plants
What are soft corals?
The larval form of a jellyfish
What is planula?
Resemble tiny sea anemones. However, they build protective walls around themselves that they leave behind to form large structures.
What is coral?
The inner layer of the cnidarian skin
What is gastrodermis?
A colony of hundreds of jelly-like creatures all linked together, making it appear to be just one creature
What is a Portuguese man-o-war?
Corals that build hard skeletons around themselves. These are the reef-building corals.
What are stony corals?
Cnidarians that have dangling tentacles
What are medusae?
Cnidarians that are often thought of as plants and called the "flowers of the sea"
What are sea anemones?
The lid to a nematocyst's jar that can spring open
What is the capsule?
The ability to make light, like a firefly or a comb jelly
What is bioluminescence?
The largest coral reef, located near Australia
What is the Great Barrier Reef?
Cnidarians that have waving tentacles
What are polyps?
Tiny phytoplankton that get captured by coral polyps. They provide nutrients and color for the polyps.
What are zooxanthellae?
The jellylike substance in between the epidermis and the gastrodermis of a cnidarian
What is mesoglea?
A non-nettle jellyfish that has no sting. Instead, it has a sticky substance on its tentacles to capture prey.
What is a comb jelly?
Coral that has lost its color because the zooxanthellae in the coral has died
What is bleached coral?