Scientists have discovered that deep sea creatures have a taste for jellyfish, despite previously thinking they avoided jelly based meals.
Jellyfish often live in massive blooms which can all die at once. Daniel Jones from the National Oceanography Centre, said in a press release that "when jellyfish blooms die off, massive quantities of the creatures can sink to the ocean floor to form ‘jelly-lakes’, which are not eaten then simply rot, depleting the oxygen on the ocean floor and repelling fish and other sea creatures."
Jones and his team gave the scavengers a single freshly dead jellyfish to try, to see if the scavengers preferred their jelly fresh.
They liked it. This suggests that although scavengers avoid the massive rotting jelly-lakes that form when blooms die, they are not averse to a bit of jellyfish per se.
The dead jellyfish was secured to the sea bed with a camera to film what happened next.
The scavengers ate the whole jellyfish in 2.5 hours. Dead jellyfish sink fast once they die, making them a quick transport mechanism for nutrients from the shallower sun-exposed waters to the dark depths. The scientists now think that dead jellyfish could be a key element in the scavengers diets.
As a bonus here's a video of some hagfish eating mackerel.
You can see the full videos here.
The results of this were published in the Proceedings Of The Royal Society B.
rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org