4/3/2023 0 Comments Hawaii jellyfissh![]() ![]() Their swimming speed and power was impressive!” ![]() “Further, as divers tracking the migration in the water, we faced a strong south easterly (Diamond Head) current that the box jellies swam successfully perpendicular to but, we divers with tanks and big cameras could not. “The period of the lunar cycle with a key number of hours of darkness or the ‘absence of light’ cues mature animals to specifically swim to the shore line to spawn,” said Yanagihara. ![]() “We also discovered that all the box jellies comprising the shoreline aggregation were actively spawning.”īased on studies of thousands of beached box jellies, Yanagihara found that the gonads were all replete with gametes or freshly spent-meaning they were nearshore to reproduce. “We found that the dangerous monthly shoreline appearance of the Hawaiian Box Jellyfish , correlates with the specific nights of the lunar month-referred to as Kāloa in the Hawaiian calendar-with a critical number of hours of darkness after sunset and before moonrise,” said Yanagihara. The senior scientist team of Yanagihara and SOEST oceanography professor Margaret McManus conceived of and began this collaborative study ten years ago starting from monthly box jelly census data collected by the Yanagihara Lab from 1997 to the present. With the new study, the team provided in-depth answers based upon cutting-edge oceanographic approaches including nightlong off shore vessel tracking, computer modeling of local currents and side scan sonar, as well as fundamental field ecology methods and anatomical microscopy. While the monthly shoreline aggregations are understood to occur like clockwork 8-10 days after each full moon, with jelly forecasts included on the local news, mysteries have remained: Why are they appearing at this particular part of the lunar cycle? Where do these box jellies come from and where are they found the rest of the lunar cycle? Why has this become a monthly problem in only the last 30 years? Burns School of Medicine, researchers at the UH at Mānoa have been carefully tracking local box jellies for over 20 years. Led by Angel Yanagihara, associate research professor at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and the John A. Credit: Keoki Stender.Īn insightful cross-disciplinary team of University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa researchers, working for over a decade, published a study recently revealing that a key number of hours of darkness during the lunar cycle triggers mature “Hawaiian box jellyfish” ( Alatina alata) to swim to leeward O‘ahu shores to spawn. Angel Yanagihara with a Hawaiian Box Jellyfish. ![]()
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