Lion's Mane Jellyfish

• It is the largest jellyfish in the world. The largest recorded specimen, stranded in Massachusetts Bay in 1870, had a bell 2.3 metres across and tentacles almost 37 metres long: longer than a blue whale.
• Its tentacles, up to 1,200 of them, hang in eight groups forming the dense curtain that gives it the name lion's mane.
• Despite its size it lives only a year: the medusa appears in spring, grows all summer and dies in autumn.
• Its sting is painful but rarely dangerous. It features in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Lion's Mane, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Juvenile cod and other fish shelter among its tentacles, immune to the sting, using it as a mobile escort.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - no skeleton (gelatinous cnidarian)

Habitat and environment

Cold waters of the North Atlantic, the North Pacific and the Arctic seas; it drifts through the water column trailing a curtain of tentacles

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Cyanea capillata