How fast can jellyfish swim

It should be noted that the jellyfish were closely monitored to make sure that they were not harmed. Jellyfish do not have a brain or pain receptors, but they have been found to secrete mucus when stressed, and no such secretion was observed in this experiment. In addition, the jellyfish went back to swimming normally once the prosthetic was removed. The research represents a "middle ground" between two veins of bioinspired robotics work that Dabiri has been involved in for the past decade, both at Caltech and Stanford.

One involves the use of purely mechanical components and the other purely biological materials. With purely mechanical systems, Dabiri has had success building robots that look like real animals but require much more energy to accomplish the same tasks.

However, although they are more elegant than robots, purely biological systems are a lot more fragile. Indeed, in collaboration with colleagues at Harvard University, Dabiri has shown that rat heart cells can respond to electric fields —which potentially makes them useful building blocks for biological devices—but the cells only survive under laboratory conditions. Dabiri was interested in leveraging jellyfish for ocean exploration and sensing because of their abundance: the species used in the current experiments can be found throughout the earth's oceans, at depths ranging from the surface to the bottom of deep trenches.

Currently, the prosthetic can direct jellyfish to start swimming and control the pace. Visit our Librarian Gateway for additional information on purchasing a site license to this and other products.

Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Instead, they create a high-pressure pocket of water beneath their bells that gives them a boost. Moon jellyfish create a pocket of water under their bell as they squeeze their bodies to swim. Brad Gemmell at the University of South Florida in Tampa and his colleagues recorded the movements of eight moon jellyfish swimming freely in a tank.

To track the eddies of water created as the jellyfish swam, they shone a laser into the tank to illuminate microscopic glass beads that moved with the flowing water.