Featured Creatures

Life can be stressful for anemones. Fortunately, the green microalgal symbionts in some anemone tissues provide them with nutrition and antioxidants that help them cope with stressors.

One of the most popular and most photographed exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium is the beautiful mesmerizing ballet of sea nettles. The Pacific sea nettle, Chrysaora fuscescens, lives in coastal waters from Alaska to California, to Japan, Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands, and the Bering Sea. With their long, trailing tentacles these jellies are large: their bells are about 17.7 inches (45 cm) in diameter, mouth-arms from 12 to 15 feet (3.6 to 4.6 m) long. The frilly mouth-arms and tentacles are covered with stinging cells, called nematocysts.

Believe it or not, millions of tiny delicate coral animals create the enormous coral reefs that can even be seen from outer space. The coral polyps (cnidarians related to anemones and jellies) live in a colony. Together they build a mineral skeleton from calcium carbonate, which creates a complicated reef structure with a myriad of shapes and sizes.Coral structures provide endless habitats for other animals to live. It’s impossible to talk about corals without talking about the entire reef ecosystem. Coral reefs are the most diverse of any marine ecosystem, often referred to as the rainforests of the sea. A quarter of all marine species depend on coral reefs for food or shelter, or both. 

​The Illuminating World of the CtenophoreCtenophore is a small and absolutely beautiful creature. Known as comb jellies, they use eight longitudinal rows of cilia for locomotion. When the cilia beat, light is scattered, producing a rainbow of colors. The beating combs act like a prism, breaking the light into its color components. Some species of comb jellies (like so many animals in the deep sea) make their own light, called bioluminescence.

Keep Your Friends Close, BUT! … Your Anemones CLOSER!Sure, there were lots of reasons for Nemo to bust out of that Dentist office aquarium. In our version of the story, it was mostly because he couldn’t bear to live outside of his anemone.Nemo is a clownfish, also known as anemonefish because these fish make their homes in anemones. Of over 1,000 anemone species worldwide, only 10 coexists with tropical clownfish. The fish and its anemone are in a symbiotic relationship – this means that the fish benefits from the anemone and vice versa.Clownfish are the only fish capable of living in an anemone without getting stung by its tentacles. Like their relatives, jellies and corals, anemones have stinging cells on their tentacles. How do the clownfish escape being stung? They have a slimy mucus covering that protects them from the stinging tentacles. Scientists know this because they took clownfish, wiped off the covering, and found that the fish would get stung when they were returned to their home anemone.

Most of us have seen sea anemones on the rocky shores. But, the pom-pom anemone (Liponema brevicornis) lives unattached on muddy seafloors at depths of 330-3,300 feet. It feeds on food particles drifting by. They have been found near hydrothermal vents and cold seeps as well as near whale carcasses.

Corals are cnidarians, in the same large family as anemones. There are more than a thousand coral species worldwide, but the best known are the stony corals, like staghorns, which make skeletons of calcium carbonate. What looks like one organism is actually a colony made of tiny coral polyps that look like tiny anemones. Inside each polyp live plant-like cells called zooxanthellae that produce food from sunlight, supplying energy to the coral. In turn, the coral polyp supplies the zooxanthellae with nutrients from the ocean and shelter. It’s these zooxanthellae that are sensitive to the increase in ocean temperatures.