Big Red Jellyfish

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The Big Red Jellyfish... is a big, red jellyfish.

Well, that's it for this extraordinary animal. Thanks for visiting Real Monstrosities on this fine day and please come back soon for more!

Only joking.

It IS really big and red, though. They can reach about 1 metre across and live in the deep sea, where a red colour is actually really good camouflage since it appears as black as the surrounding darkness down there. They have been spotted in various parts of the Pacific Ocean, in California, Hawaii and Japan, at depths between 600 and 1,500 metres (2,000-5,000 feet).

Image by NOAA Photo Library via Flickr

They are very strange jellyfish. While most of their cousins have a "suggestion of ghostly wistfulness", the Big Red really doesn't. It looks instead all fleshy and chunky, a suggestion of being really hungry all the time. And what does it eat? How does it catch it? No-one knows. They have no tentacles at all, instead there are just the meaty arms. Furthermore, some Big Reds have as many as 7 arms, others as few as 4. The number of oral arms can usually be used as a way to distinguish between species of jellyfish, but it doesn't seem to work with the Big Red. And that's about all that is so far known about this very mysterious creature. It looks far too flabby to be enigmatic, but there you are.

Well, that's it for this extraordinary animal. Thanks for visiting Real Monstrosities on this fine day and please come back soon for more!