An Exotic Jellyfish

We've now seen three of these small, colourless and rather characterless jellyfish washed up along the Golspie beach but had been unable to identify them - until Rachael sorted us out. She, too, had seen some at Golspie, and the reason we had been unable to identify it was that we had been searching on the net for British jellyfish - and this one's native waters are along the western coast of North America.

It's called the crystal jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, and it's bioluminescent, the rim of its bell glowing green in the dark. This might be of no more than passing interest except that two proteins involved in its bioluminescence, aequorin and green fluorescent protein (GFP), were discovered by Osamu Shimomura and his colleagues, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in applying these as markers in biological research.

The jellyfish was first reported in the Moray Firth in 2009. How they got here is a bit of a mystery but it seems most likely that they were brought from the Pacific in a cargo ship which cleaned out its bilges off the east coast of Scotland.