A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1187 entries
comb jelly
A comb jelly is a transparent marine animal that swims with eight rows of fused hairs beating in waves down its body. They are the largest animals that move by cilia. The beating rows scatter light into a running band of color that travels the length of the animal, which is refraction rather than any pigment of its own. Most comb jellies also produce their own blue-green light when disturbed. They are not jellyfish and do not sting.
Etymology
The English name describes the eight rows, which look like the teeth of a comb laid along the body. The scientific name means the same thing in Greek and is on this site separately as ctenophore. Sailors and naturalists have called them sea gooseberries, sea walnuts, and Venus’s girdle, the last for a species that grows as a transparent ribbon several feet long and swims by undulating.
Notes
Instead of stinging cells, they carry colloblasts, sticky cells that fire out a thread and glue prey to it, and no other animal group has them. Most comb jellies are both male and female at once. The running rainbow is visible in daylight and is easiest to see against a dark background at the side of a boat.