Upside Down Jellyfish

After I wrote the blogs on the oil spill, I found myself thinking more and more about jellyfish. I couldn’t figure out why until it dawned on me jellyfish are spineless, brainless, masses of slippery tissue. Some can actually sting you. If that isn’t an allegory for BP’s role in the mess, if not that of the government, then I don’t know what would be.

So that naturally (for me, anyway) led me back to Lover’s Key several years ago when I learned that there really were upside down jellyfish and they don’t work for BP. Not all of them anyway….

I was walking across the bridge over the tidal inlet when I noticed the bottom was practically covered with what looked like anemones. Looking closer, I could tell they weren’t actually attached to the bottom and they had “bells” which anemones don’t have. Just like jellyfish. Except the bells, normally the top part of the jellyfish, were inverted and resting upside down on the bottom with their short tentacles waving upward in the current. Odd as it was, it seemed they all liked it that way.

But, I’d never heard of this sort of thing back then and I did what anyone would do: I asked a park ranger,

“What are those things on the bottom of the inlet? They look just like upside down jellyfish.”

“Upside down jellyfish,” replied the ranger.

“Yes,” I said, thinking I had heard a question mark at the end of the sentence and waiting expectantly for more.

She said nothing so I thought maybe she was looking it up somewhere. Finally I asked tentatively,

“Um, what are they called?”

“Upside down jellyfish.”

“Yes,” I said again. “What are they?”

She gave me a long, searching look that dissolved into either resignation or possibly pity…. The sort of look we who live down here reserve for impossibly stupid tourists from up north.

“Listen carefully,” she said gently as if speaking to a small, dense child, “They are called UP-SIDE-DOWN-JEL-LY-FISH.”

“oh”, I said, slinking away feeling like a participant in the old Abbott and Costello baseball routine “Who’s on first.”

That was right up (or maybe “down”) there with the phone call I made in 2001 about several manatees in trouble wallowing around in the shallow water of Big Carlos Pass and even beaching themselves. After the wildlife specialist on the telephone stopped laughing, I was told the manatees were in the process of attempting to make more manatees. And since manatees don’t create permanent liaisons as we sometimes do, it was further explained to me they were unlikely to have permanent problems…..