Ocean · plate 51 of 60
Jellyfish
Aurelia aurita
No brain. No heart. No complaints.
Only 1.6% of people are Jellyfish. (estimated)
If you're a Jellyfish
You go where the current goes and you have stopped pretending otherwise. You are not ambitious, not anxious and not especially curious, but you are everywhere, usually with hundreds of others exactly like you, and you have outlasted almost everything that ever planned anything. People underestimate you. You don't notice. There is nothing in you to notice with.
A moon jelly has no brain, heart or blood, and in 1991 a batch of them flew on a Space Shuttle so that scientists could watch them develop without gravity.
The Jellyfish as a spirit animal
You are easygoing to a degree that other people find either restful or alarming. You take the shape of your circumstances, you travel light, and you do not carry grudges because there is nowhere to put them. The flaw is that going with the flow is not the same as choosing it, and you would struggle to say which you are doing. A jellyfish has drifted into every ocean on earth without once deciding to.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Jellyfish
Do
- Suggest the plan; they'll come along, or at least be carried along.
- Keep things low-stakes and unhurried.
- Enjoy the company of many of them at once; it is how they arrive.
Don't
- Don't ask for a decision. There is no organ for it.
- Don't brush up against them when they're upset; even the mild ones sting a little.
When it goes wrong: A jellyfish in trouble pulses and drifts; you can't argue with it, so move the obstacle, not the jellyfish.
The Jellyfish in a relationship
You love lightly, without clinging, and you tend to find yourself in relationships rather than choosing them. You travel in company but you are not attached to any one companion in particular. Partners find you serene or impossible to pin down, depending on the day, and in both cases you are drifting.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 6
- Boldness
- 1
- Energy
- 1
- Curiosity
- 0
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 8
- Jellyfish are about 95 percent water.
- Before it drifts, a jellyfish spends part of its life as a polyp fixed to the sea floor, budding off tiny jellies.
- Animals like it have been pulsing through the oceans for more than 500 million years, longer than fish have had jaws.
Jellyfish in literature
- The Jellyfish — The Jelly Fish and the Monkey (Japanese Fairy Tales), traditional (Japanese), retold by Yei Theodora Ozaki (1908)
- The medusae — Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne (1870)
- The Sea Witch's polyps — The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen (1837)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Jellyfish's. If you got Jellyfish, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other ocean
Among the 60
Julius Fürst (1861–1938), Schleswig-Holstein meerumschlungen in Wort und Bild, Hippolyt Haas (1896). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
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