Israeli Jellyfish Found To Possess Surprising Navigational Skills‌ ‌

If you’ve ever visited an Israeli beach during jellyfish season and watched a swarm of graceful jellies float through the sea, you might think that they’ve found real inner peace, casually drifting wherever the whims of the ocean waves take them.

If that’s what you thought, though, you’re actually super wrong.

Turns out jellyfish are actively trying to get somewhere, they’re just really bad at it.

This news comes as the result of a new study from the University of Haifa’s Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, which has revealed that jellyfish in the southeastern Mediterranean Sea possess unexpected navigational abilities.

The research, published in Current Biology, focused on aggregations of Rhopilema nomadica, the most common jellyfish species in the region.

Yoav Lehahn, the study’s editor from the department of marine geosciences, elaborated on the findings.

“Until now, it was assumed that jellyfish aggregations swim in a random manner, so that their direction is dictated solely by water currents. Thanks to innovative research methods, we discovered that along the coast of Israel, jellyfish swim toward the west, against the direction of the waves,” he said.

This discovery contradicts common understandings about jellyfish movement and could have implications for predicting their arrivals at coastal facilities such as power stations and desalination plants (two places where it would really stink to have a huge mass of jellyfish clogging up the works).