Purple jellyfish with multiple mouths could be new species

Scientists believe a bright purple jellyfish covered in tiny mouths that has washed up on a beach in Queensland, Austarlia, could be an undiscovered species. The extraordinary colour of the creature has baffled marine experts, who are now trying to determine the species, which sadly died during analysis.



"It's straight out of science fiction," said marine biologist Dr Lisa Gershwin. "It's an electric, vibrant, ‘wow’ purple." She said the tentacles, or oral arms, were about a metre long and covered in microscopic mouths. Lifeguards on the sunshine coast found the jellyfish at Coolum beach on Wednesday morning and handed it over to scientists at nearby Underwater World.

Gershwin believed the jellyfish could be a thysanostoma, but said the species was normally brown or beige. "It begs the question, if it's such a vibrant, different colour, what other features does it have?" Gershwin, from the CSIRO marine and atmospheric research centre, said. The plot thickened on Thursday, with pictures emerging of a second specimen from Ballina in northern New South Wales.


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Dr Gershwin said it was possible the jellyfish had arrived in Australia in the ballast of a ship. If it is a species known as a thysanostoma, it could have come from the Red Sea, Malaysia or the Philippines. ``The reason we haven’t been able to progress this is because the literature is in German and from the 1800s,’’ she said. ``No work has been done on this since then. I’m getting the papers translated by a native German speaker. We need to find out if it’s new to science and, if it is, why it hasn’t been seen before. If it’s not from here, we need to work out where it came from and how it got here.’’