I’ve always loved jellyfish. Bulbous and mysterious and luminescent. Pink, blue, purple, or just transparent. They float through the waters serenely, propelled by their own mouths, even as their long tendrils shock and asphyxiate anything that dares cross. I looked up how to own one as a pet just to see if anyone was audacious enough—and of course, they are. You’d sooner keep the wind as a pet, or the seeds of a dandelion. Nature can be put in glass but it cannot be owned.
And they are more like plants, aren’t they? They don’t have large eyes like fish or the octopus. They don’t seem to communicate any sort of will or desire. They just are. The shrimp and small fish ensnared in their tendrils and taken to their mouths are a lot like the victims of a venus flytrap—animals preyed on by something like a carnivorous plant. The jellyfish has no brain, just the simplest sensory organs.
I was scuba diving in the warm waters of Boca Raton, Florida the first time I saw a jellyfish in person, not trapped behind glass, not captured in the eye of a camera or the lens of a documentary. My little flippers propelled me upward slowly but surely as we returned to the boat, my jacket inflated to add a little more buoyancy. Slow ascent was essential. No one wants the bends.
And then I saw it. Right by my flipper. A jellyfish all alone. A baby. It was no bigger than a cellphone. It seemed separated from its family. In my naivety I was afraid to let it get too close to my fin—what if I was stung like in Finding Nemo?—and I quickly left it behind. I still think about that little guy. I wonder if he ever found his school.