We at Washed-up Foods Inc. are preparing to launch our first breakfast cereal. It’s called Sugar Frosted Moon Flakes.
It’s made from our local moon jelly (Aurelia aurita), one of the jellyfish species harvested for human consumption. Dried jellies are used in several Asian cuisines, and are high in protein and low in fat, but with a high proportion of polyunsaturated fat. So they are good for you. But apparently, no one has thought to make sugared breakfast cereal from them. We’re gonna get rich!
Moon jellies are about 95 percent water. So when they dry out on the beach, they become a round, wafer-thin film. We cut these desiccated jellies into flakes and coat them in coarse granulated sugar to help disguise the sand.
This summer I found enough washed-up moon jellies for the initial test launch of our product. They seem to be the most commonly washed-up large jellyfish on our local beaches — sometimes stranding by the hundreds. They swim by pulsating their umbrella-canopy-shaped bodies, but they are weak swimmers, even compared to other jellyfish. So they are at the mercy of currents and beaches.
Moon jellies are commonly more than a foot in diameter and are a pleasing translucent purple and/or blue. Unlike many familiar jellyfish, moon jellies only have very short tentacles that ring the margin of their dome. The tentacles have stinging cells but they are not large or powerful enough to affect a human. They also have four prominent horseshoe-shaped gonads under the dome, which are visible through the body. Thin branching lines radiate from the tentacles to the jelly’s center, helping move trapped prey to the stomach.
Moon jellies are predators of just about any small animal that contacts its tentacles, including juvenile fishes, crustaceans and any kind of unlucky larva. Predators of adult moon jellies include a variety of fishes, sea turtles, birds and other large jellyfish.
The reproductive cycle of all jellyfish is complex. But moon jellies take the process in even stranger directions. Male moon jellies release sperm in the presence of females. But unlike most other jellyfish, the females retain the fertilized eggs and effectively guard them. The eggs hatch into a free-swimming larva called a “planula.” This planula settles on the bottom and transforms into a colony of polyps. The polyps then bud off tiny dome-shaped individual “medusae.” These medusae grow into the familiar adult moon jelly.
But recent research has shown that moon jellies can “grow younger” during adverse conditions by reverting to the polyp stage to produce new medusae that are genetic clones of the original adult. In principle, this cycle can occur an unlimited number of times. So, they are said to be “biologically immortal,” though each individual is likely to die before doing this multiple times, especially after Moon Flakes become popular.
This process of cells reverting to previous types of cells is called “transdifferentiation.” Due to this ability, moon jellies are an important test organism for the study of aging in humans. And if we can force adult humans to revert to children, we can sell a lot more sugared cereal!
For marketing purposes, we have a cartoon mascot who tries to steal Moon Flakes from children. He’s a huge anthropomorphic crab with a bandit mask and impossibly large claws.
When the kids see the bandit crab approaching, they say, “Silly crab, Moon Flakes are for kids!” The crab replies with his catchphrase: “Give me the goddam Moon Flakes or I’ll crush your heads.”
(Please contact me at the email address above for an investment prospectus.)
Biologist Mike Kelly (he/him) is also the author of the book Tigerfish: Traditional and Sport Fishing on the Niger River, Mali, West Africa. It’s available at Amazon or everywhere e-books are sold.
This article appears in The Battle Over Bear River.