A 2023 Hollywood film Nyad takes viewers on a journey alongside Diana Nyad in her five attempts at a historic 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida. Annette Bening was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Nyad in the movie that also starred Jodie Foster. Nyad’s inspiring true story was made possible, in part, by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa research associate professor Angel Yanagihara.

Yanagihara, who is with the and John A. Burns School of Medicine , played a key role in developing topical technologies (for which she is sole inventor, US Patent #10,172,883) including a cream that prevents box jellyfish stings, a life threatening hurdle Nyad had to face to complete her record breaking swim.

Nyad contacted Yanagihara in March 2012 after she was severely stung by box jellies during her third attempt to complete the swim. She found Yanagihara’s name while searching the internet for people who had anything to do with box jellies.

“I received an email out of the blue with 40 detailed questions,” said Yanagihara. “I looked her up and saw that she had a TED talk and I listened to that and I was immediately smitten by this person and how much discipline she brought to her athleticism and her goal.”

Yanagihara’s own experience with a box jellyfish sting at Kaimana Beach in 1997 that required emergency care. That spurred her research after she discovered no one had studied the venom’s biochemistry. Nyad’s team sought Yanagihara’s expertise and wanted her to accompany Nyad on her next swim attempts.

“They insisted that they absolutely needed me to be on this swim in person,” Yanagihara said. “I realized if I didn’t go, she might very well die because of the lack of general understanding of this venom including the mistaken care that previous folks had given her by injecting her with epinephrine on her last attempt.”

Testing out the cream on herself

At the time, Yanagihara’s research had focused on developing treatments for combat divers and special forces personnel affected by jellyfish stings. However, Nyad sought a preventative solution. Yanagihara conducted various tests on the discharge mechanism of box jellyfish tentacles and found a working combination, which she then compounded into anhydrous lanolin used by long-distance ocean swimmers to prevent chapping.

“After exhaustive in vitro testing, I found a combination that did work,” Yanagihara said. “I went out swimming by myself with it on and then I laid a live box jellyfish on my own skin and it worked!”

Yanagihara’s contribution to Nyad’s swim emphasizes the role of research and collaboration in pushing the boundaries of human achievement.

“It’s very important to highlight that there are highly innovative approaches at the University of Hawaiʻi,” said Yanagihara. “This work was initially solely supported by the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation. I would like to see novel funding mechanisms at ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ to foster a more innovative ecosystem.”

Yanagihara’s character was also cast in the film Nyad and was portrayed by actress Jeena Li.

“While it was fun to be included in name, the Hollywood version of my role was almost unrecognizable. My actual research was not included. I was in the water as a free diver from dusk to dawn, the actress appears to only have been in the water once,” said Yanagihara on being played by Li in the film.

A key number of hours of darkness during the lunar cycle triggers mature Hawaiian box jellyfish (Alatina alata) to swim to leeward shores on Oʻahu to spawn. That’s according to a published comprising more than a decade of work by a cross-disciplinary team of University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers.

Led by Angel Yanagihara, associate research professor at the ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa (SOEST) and the , ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa researchers have been carefully tracking local box jellyfish for more than 20 years. While the monthly shoreline aggregations are understood to occur like clockwork 8–10 days after each full moon, with jelly forecasts included on the local news, mysteries have remained: Why are they appearing at this particular part of the lunar cycle? Where do these box jellyfish come from and where are they found the rest of the lunar cycle? Why has this become a monthly problem in only the last 30 years?

Combining biology, oceanography

With the new study, the team provided in-depth answers based upon cutting-edge oceanographic approaches including nightlong offshore vessel tracking, computer modeling of local currents and side scan sonar, as well as fundamental field ecology methods and anatomical microscopy.

The senior scientist team of Yanagihara and SOEST oceanography professor Margaret McManus began this collaborative study 10 years ago starting from monthly box jelly census data collected by the Yanagihara Lab from 1997 to present.

“We found that the dangerous monthly shoreline appearance of the Hawaiian box jellyfish, correlates with the specific nights of the lunar month—referred to as Kāloa in the Hawaiian calendar—with a critical number of hours of darkness after sunset and before moonrise,” said Yanagihara. “We also discovered that all the box jellies comprising the shoreline aggregation were actively spawning.”

Based on studies of thousands of beached box jellies, Yanagihara found that the gonads were all replete with gametes or freshly spent—meaning they were nearshore to reproduce.

“The period of the lunar cycle with a key number of hours of darkness or the ‘absence of light’ cues mature animals to specifically swim to the shore line to spawn,” said Yanagihara. “Further, as divers tracking the migration in the water, we faced a strong south easterly (Diamond Head) current that the box jellies swam successfully perpendicular to but, we divers with tanks and big cameras could not. Their swimming speed and power was impressive!”

With McManus’ oceanographic analysis, the researchers hypothesize that jellies are on the leeward side of Diamond Head Crater for the rest of the lunar cycle, benefitting from the shelter and food provided by the persistent eddy in the study area, which appears to be the “source point” for the jellyfish or where the box jellies come from.

Improving public awareness, sting care

¶«¾«Ó°Òµ scientists are addressing issues of importance and concern to residents and tourists alike who enjoy ±á²¹·É²¹¾±ʻ¾±â€™s coastal waters. This is also of great importance to other tropical islands with local populations of this same species, Alatina alata. While there are more than 40 species of box jellies world wide, Alatina alata is the only species that exhibits this clockwork lunar spawning migration behavior.

The team also studied Alatina alata migrations in Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and Key West, Fla. This research revealed the unique life cycle involving specific shoreline bathymetry (measuring water depth) features which support persistent anticyclonic eddy features as well as the lunar trigger for spawning and will allow the team to further investigate other Oʻahu locations, where box jellies have not been observed historically but have now become more common such as Pūpūkea and Kailua.

“This work is very important to the state in terms of planning and tourism as well as improved signage, public awareness and dissemination of evidence-based jellyfish sting care,” said Yanagihara.

In the future, the team hopes to continue these studies to model other offshore bay features adjacent to box jelly beaching events and to track population numbers which can become emerging public health concerns for ocean swimmers and beach goers. Specifically, research efforts are being designed to inform and predict, as well as, to help guide policies to restore food web balance to keep box jelly numbers in check in Hawaiʻi and other tropical localities where Alatina alata also represent a concern for beach goers.

This work is an example of ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa’s goal of (PDF), one of four goals identified in the (PDF), updated in December 2020.

–By Marcie Grabowski

In recent decades, trusted first aid resources have recommended stings from man o’ war (Physalia species) be treated differently from other jellies. But when researchers at the dug into the scientific literature, they found scant evidence to support such individualized first aid.

Adding to a recent push for evidence-based sting treatments, members of the (PCRL) at ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa—, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral fellow and , senior author, head of the PCRL and assistant research professor at the ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa and —teamed up with colleagues in Ireland to investigate which commonly recommended first aid actions (such as rinsing with seawater) are the most effective for Physalia stings.

The results, , defy the recent abandonment of historic advice, and suggest that man o’ war stings are no different than other jellyfish stings; the best first aid is to rinse with vinegar to remove any residual stingers or bits of tentacle left on the skin and then immerse in 45°C (113°F) hot water or apply a hot pack for 45 minutes.

Physalia (Physalia utriculus, also called bluebottles in the Pacific or Physalia physalis, Portuguese man o’ war in the Atlantic) are among the most recognizable stinging jellies with their bright blue tentacles and colorful inflated floating sails. Strandings of bluebottles are common in Hawaiʻi as the onshore winds push thousands of these small, painful critters onto the beaches. Similar mass strandings are frequent with the Atlantic species too, and have been known to cause hundreds of stings in a single day on beaches from Florida to France.

Atlantic man o’ war treatment parallel

Yanagihara teamed up with Tom Doyle, a jellyfish scientist and lecturer with the . Doyle and his team performed experiments using the Atlantic man o’ war in parallel with those conducted by Wilcox and Yanagihara in Hawaiʻi. The results from opposite sides of the world lined up beautifully: the venom delivered by a man o’ war sting was lessened if the sting site was rinsed with vinegar, regardless of which species of Physalia was used.

Even better, if you have it available, was Spray, a combined stinging capsule and venom-inhibiting product developed by Yanagihara with Department of Defense funding. Seawater rinsing, on the other hand, spread stinging capsules over more area and thus made stings, much worse. To treat stings after rinsing away the tentacles, both groups found 45 minutes of 45°C (113°F) heat application effectively inactivated already-injected venom, while the application of ice packs made stings worse.

For more information, .

—By Marcie Grabowski

Being stung by a jellyfish is one of the fastest ways to ruin a fun day at the beach. But what you do after you’re stung has the potential to make you feel much better or make matters a lot worse. Researchers at the University of investigated whether commonly recommended first aid actions such as rinsing with seawater or scraping away tentacles lessen the severity of stings from two dangerous box jellyfish species. Their results, , reveal that some of the most commonly recommended practices actually worsen stings.

“Anyone who Googles ‘how to treat a jellyfish sting’ will encounter authoritative web articles claiming the best thing to do is rinse the area with seawater, scrape away any remaining tentacles, and then treat the sting with ice,” said , lead author of the paper and assistant research professor at the ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa and (JABSOM). “We put those methods to the test in the lab and found they actually make stings much, much worse.”

Box jellies are among the deadliest animals in the oceans responsible for more deaths every year than sharks. Even mild stings cause severe pain and can leave horrible scars.

Yanagihara, aided by , a postdoctoral fellow at JABSOM, looked at the best ways to respond to stings from two dangerous box jelly species, the Hawaiian box jelly Alatina alata here in Hawaiʻi and the largest box jelly in the world, the Australian box jelly Chironex fleckeri. In order to conduct the study, Yanagihara, traveled to Cape York Australia in December 2016 to work on-site with live Chironex. For both, they examined how different ways of removing tentacles—rinsing with vinegar or seawater, scraping with a credit card or simply plucking them off—affected the amount of venom injected during a sting using a human tissue model designed by Yanagihara. They also looked at whether treating with ice packs or hot packs reduced the damage done by the venom.

The most and least effective treatments

The team found that some of the most commonly recommended actions, including rinsing with seawater, scraping the tentacles and applying ice, dramatically increased the severity of the stings. “Less than one percent of stinging cells on a tentacle actually fire when you’re first stung,” explained Wilcox. “So anything you do that moves the tentacles or adherent stinging cell capsules around has the potential to increase the amount of venom injected into you by many fold.”

Instead of rinsing with seawater or scraping, the team found that rinsing with vinegar—which irreversibly prevents the stinging cells from firing—or even simply plucking tentacles off with tweezers led to less venom injection. And after the sting, applying heat actively decreased venom activity. Applying ice not only didn’t help, for stings from the Hawaiian box jelly, it actually enhanced the venom’s activity to make stings cause more than twice the damage. And, if you have it available, the team found the best way to treat a jelly sting was the combination of ™ Spray and Cream, a venom-inhibiting product duo developed by Yanagihara with Hawaiʻi Community Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense funding.

“Box jellies are incredibly dangerous animals. The more venom they inject, the more likely a victim is to suffer severe, even life threatening symptoms,” said Yanagihara. “The increases in venom injection and activity we saw in our study from methods like scraping and applying ice could mean the difference between life and death in a serious box jelly sting.”

“It’s all too easy to find bad advice on treating jelly stings on the internet,” said Wilcox. But she also noted that such bad advice isn’t solely the fault of the sites that provide it. “Even in the peer-reviewed literature, there are a lot of examples of recommendations that are made in passing in discussion sections without any direct evidence to back them up, and then those just keep getting repeated and cited over and over even though they’re not based on rigorous, empirical scientific evidence.”

The team expects these statistically powered findings will prompt online medical sites, government agencies, and the broader medical community to re-evaluate the advice they provide on treating jelly stings. International collaborators and colleagues have joined in this effort and are conducting similar studies around the world using this Yanagihara-Wilcox sting model to test locally prevalent jellyfish species in a similar push to develop evidence-based medical practices.

Sting No More™ (Alatalab Solutions, LLC) was developed under a Department of Defense grant that aimed to rapidly and effectively treat stings in U.S. Special Operations Command combat divers. With the intention of supporting the development of technologies and therapies of benefit to people, the funding required a commercialization plan for resulting products. All testing of the new commercial product, in the current study was performed under an approved University of Hawaiʻi Conflict of Interest plan. This product demonstrates the strongly pro-innovation culture at ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ dedicated to bringing to the public sector technologies that have been developed with federal and state research dollars.

—By Marcie Grabowski

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researcher has been selected as a Fulbright Specialist by the . Yanagihara is an assistant research professor at the and the in the .

Her expertise and innovative technologies were specifically sought in a newly approved Fulbright project proposed by researchers at the .

Said Yanagihara, “I first met the National University of Ireland Galway research faculty member and fisheries researchers after they requested that I be invited to participate in a and documentary titled .”

“We actually did some novel experiments at that time under the auspices and with the funding support of the two broadcast networks. This research project is an outcome of that pilot work,” she said.

Taking her jellyfish expertise to Ireland

Yanagihara will travel to Ireland again to work with faculty and students on research efforts aimed at addressing dangerous stings of the lion’s mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata). Increasing numbers of lion’s mane jellyfish in Dublin Bay have led to beach closures and have been linked to serious Irukandji syndrome symptoms in swimmers.

Yanagihara will also test innovative new approaches to prevent salmon deaths in offshore fisheries following exposure to massive jellyfish blooms.

“There is a critical need to mitigate the negative economic and public health impacts of increasing numbers and frequencies of jellyfish blooms in coastal zones of Ireland. I look forward to sharing the expertise and break through technologies I developed at the University of Hawaiʻi, in collaborative efforts to address the serious impacts of jellyfish blooms,” she said.

As a Fulbright Specialist, Yanagihara will be considered for additional future overseas assignments that require her unique expertise during the next five years.

¶«¾«Ó°Òµ News video on Yanagihara’s research

, January 19, 2016

, December 12, 2012

More on the Fulbright program

As the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government, the Fulbright Specialists Program is designed to support highly qualified U.S. faculty and professionals with expertise in specific disciplines. They engage in collaborative projects that focus on unmet needs and challenges, and build and strengthen capacity in curriculum and faculty development at institutions of higher education in more than 100 countries.

—By Tina Shelton

A recent study by researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, , may finally put to rest the ongoing debate about whether to use cold or heat to treat jellyfish stings. Their systematic and critical review provides overwhelming evidence that clinical outcomes from all kinds of jellyfish stings are improved following treatment with hot packs or hot-water immersion.

Jellyfish stings are a growing public health concern worldwide and are responsible for more deaths than shark attacks each year. Even “mild” stings can hurt for hours to days and leave lasting scars. Despite the danger posed by these gelatinous invertebrates, scientists and medical professionals still do not agree on the best way to treat and manage jellyfish stings. At the center of the contentious debate is whether it is better to treat the sting site with heat or cold.

Heat is the key

“People think ice will help because jelly stings burn and ice is cold,” said , a postdoctoral fellow at the and lead author of the paper. “And if you Google it, many sites —even those considered reputable—will tell you to put ice on a sting to dull the pain. But research to date has shown that all marine venoms are highly heat sensitive, thus hot water or hot packs should be more effective than cold packs or ice.”

Dispelling bad web advice

“Authoritative web articles are constantly bombarding the public with unvalidated and frankly bad advice for how to treat jelly stings,” said , assistant research professor at the and John A. Burns School of Medicine and senior author of the paper. Yanagihara has worked for the past 18 years as director of the Pacific Cnidaria Research Laboratory and has studied the pathophysiology of jellyfish stings.

“In Hawaiʻi, and around the world, we have seen that first responders and public health decision makers rely on non-evidence-based claims found on websites. It’s not too strong to point out that in some cases, ignorance can cost lives,” said Yanagihara. “We conducted this study to rigorously assemble all the published data in hopes that policy makers will revisit this issue and carefully consider the available evidence. We are also engaged in new experimental work with models looking at vinegar effects, as well as well-designed randomized clinical trials. The goal of my laboratory’s efforts is to contribute to evidence-based best clinical practices for jellyfish stings.”

Wilcox and Yanagihara conducted a systematic review to compare the use of cold or heat in jellyfish sting treatment using a common ranking system for clinical evidence. The pair combed through more than 2,000 related articles from searches of major scientific journal article databases to find every study to date that examined the effects of using temperature-based treatments for jellyfish stings. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence supported the use of hot-water immersion (about 45 degrees Celsius). This is consistent with findings in more than a dozen articles, demonstrating that venom components are inactivated at temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius.

“I was shocked that the science was so clear, given that there is so much debate over the use of hot water,” said Wilcox. Hot-water immersion is already the standard of care for other severe marine envenomations including potentially life-threatening stonefish stings, so these results help streamline the first-aid response. “It’s simple, really: if you’re stung, use hot water or hot packs rather than ice or cold packs.”

—A John A. Burns School of Medicine and Pacific Biosciences Research Center news release

Researchers at the developed an array of highly innovative experiments to allow scientists to safely test first-aid measures used for box jellyfish stings—from folk tales, like urine, to state-of-the-art technologies developed for the military. The power of this new array approach, , is in its ability to rigorously assess the effectiveness of various treatments on inhibiting tentacle firing and venom toxicity—two aspects of a sting that affect the severity of a person’s reaction.

Box jellyfish are among the deadliest creatures on Earth and are responsible for more deaths than shark attacks annually. Despite the danger posed by these gelatinous invertebrates, scientists and medical professionals still do not agree on the best way to treat and manage jellyfish stings.

Ignorance can cost lives

“Authoritative web articles are constantly bombarding the public with unvalidated and frankly bad advice for how to treat a jelly sting,” said , lead author of the paper and assistant research professor at the ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ Mānoa and (JABSOM). “I really worry that emergency responders and public health decision makers might rely on these unscientific articles. It’s not too strong to point out that in some cases, ignorance can cost lives.”

The results from Yanagihara and team’s rigorous testing demonstrate that tried-and-true methods, including vinegar and hot water immersion, really do work on Hawaiian box jellyfish (Alatina alata) stings. Further, the study shows that a new therapeutic, , developed by Yanagihara with Department of Defense funding, inhibits the venom directly.

Testing without harm to human subjects

Yanagihara, aided by , a postdoctoral fellow at JABSOM, set out to test which first-aid measures actually help reduce the venom delivered when a tentacle stings or lessen the harm caused by venom that has been injected. But because box jelly stings can be life threatening, experimentation on people was out of the question.

“What we needed were innovative models which would allow us to test how different options might affect the severity of a sting without putting anyone at risk,” Yanagihara said. “So we designed a set of experiments using live, stinging tentacles and live human red blood cells which allowed us to pit first-aid measures against one another.”

The ultimate test compared the effects of treatments in a living sting model comprised of human red blood cells suspended in an agarose gel and covered with lanolin-rubbed sterile porcine intestine, which was used as a mock skin. The researchers found that the most effective treatments were Sting No More™ products and hot water, with Sting No More™ shown to work faster and better than hot water, according to the data.

“People think ice will help because jelly stings burn and ice is cold,” said Wilcox. “But research to date has shown that all marine venoms are highly heat sensitive. Dozens of studies, including our recent work, have shown that hot water immersion leads to better outcomes than ice.”

New approach enables broader testing

Wilcox hopes that the new experimental models will allow for more rigorous testing of first-aid measures for venomous stings from other species of Cnidaria. “The science to date has been scattered and disorganized,” she said. “We strived to design methods that were straightforward and inexpensive, so that others can use them easily. The field has suffered from a lack of standardized, rigorous and reproducible models. Our paper outlines a way to change that.”

While the current study only tested first-aid measures using the Hawaiian box jelly, the researchers said they are working on seeing how treatments work for stings from other common Hawaiian species, including the Portuguese Man O’ War which wash ashore on windward shores during strong winds. And, they hope that they won’t be the only ones testing treatments with their experimental array.

More on Angel Yanagihara’s jellyfish research

• VIDEO: – December 12, 2012
• – October 25, 2013
• – February 21, 2014

—By Marcie Grabowski

senior Amanda Shell has been named one of 12 semi-finalists in the Second LabTV Tribeca National Video Awards Contest, winning a $500 cash award. This was Shell’s first entry into the scientific journalism competition, which also included entries from professional videographers. LabTV requested short videos about researchers and what motivates them, and received entries from colleges throughout the country.

Shell is a student employee at the ’s communications department where she helps produce news stories and video reports for both the medical school’s website and for occasional distribution to local television news programs.

For her vidoe, Shell profiled ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ researcher Angel Yanagihara, whose expertise is in box jellyfish. Yanagihara has developed a therapy that effectively treats the sting of a box jellyfish. Her “sting stopper” helped swimmer Diana Nyad battle stings as Nyad made history swimming from Cuba to the United States in 2013.

Shell followed Yanagihara into the pitch-black waters off Waikīkī at three in the morning while Yanagihara collected the box jellyfish.

LabTV is an innovative, web-based video platform that showcases short, engaging videos of young medical scientists in labs across America. The mission of LabTV is to inspire today’s high school and college students to become “tomorrow’s heroes of medical science.”

In announcing the awards, LabTV’s founder Jay Walker noted, “It is an honor to share the work and passion of young scientists who have dedicated their lives to searching for the breakthroughs that will give all of us a better future. And we are equally excited to recognize the amazing work being done by young filmmakers on university campuses around the country who are on their way to celebrating hidden stories that the world needs to hear.”

Read the for more.

Researchers from , Norway, and the UK have shown with innovative experiments that a rise in jellyfish blooms near the ocean’s surface may lead to jellyfish falls that are rapidly consumed by voracious deep-sea scavengers. Previous anecdotal studies suggested that deep-sea animals might avoid dead jellyfish, causing dead jellyfish from blooms to accumulate and undergo slow degradation by microbes, depleting oxygen at the seafloor and depriving fish and invertebrate scavengers, including commercially exploited species, of food.

Globally there are huge numbers of jellyfish in the oceans. In some parts of the ocean, jellyfish “blooms” are increasing apparently due to nutrient enrichment and climate change caused by human activities. In recent years, studies have suggested that when jellyfish blooms die-off, massive quantities of jellyfish sink out of surface waters and can deposit as “jelly-lakes” at the seafloor, choking seafloor habitats of oxygen and reducing biodiversity. This latest research shows that the accumulation of dead jellyfish lakes may be unusual, with jellyfish carcasses normally being rapidly consumed by a host of typical deep-sea scavengers such as hagfish and crabs.

“We just had a hunch that dead jellyfish were important to deep-sea ecosystems in some way, even though they are made up largely of water,“ said lead author . “We therefore decided to film what the fate of jellyfish carcasses were at the seafloor so we deployed deep-sea lander systems with jellyfish bait. When we later retrieved the landers and found no jellyfish attached to the bait plates we were pleasantly surprised. However, our surprise jumped to another level when we looked at the camera images and saw just how fast the jellyfish baits were consumed and the shear number of scavengers that were consuming the baits. It just blew our minds.” Sweetman is a chief senior scientist and research coordinator for deep-sea ecosystem research at the in Norway.

“Rapid scavenging of jellyfish carcasses reveals the importance of gelatinous material to deep-sea food webs,” which was published October 15 in the , the research looked at the response by scavengers to jellyfish and fish baits in the deep-sea along the Norwegian margin. The researchers found that jellyfish and fish baits were consumed equally fast and attracted similar densities of a diversity of scavengers.

“The speed of the jellyfish scavenging was totally unexpected because earlier, previous observations seemed to suggest that jellyfish carcasses would just rot very slowly at the seafloor. It was also really interesting that the hagfish targeted the most energy-rich parts of the jellyfish, burrowing into the jellyfish carcasses to eat the gonads!” said Craig R. Smith, co-author and designer of the deep-see camera-lander systems used in the study. Smith is a professor of oceanography and Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation at .

The study further revealed that the role of jellyfish material could be seriously underestimated in global carbon budgets in the ocean, because jellyfish were removed so quickly that they fail to accumulate at the seafloor, causing scientist to overlook their role in deep-sea food webs.

“Our work shows that previous assessments of the ocean carbon cycle may have missed an important component,” said said co-author , a scientist at the in Southampton UK. “Until we saw these photos we thought that the massive amount of jellyfish material was deposited on the seafloor and was essentially taken out of the system𔆈removing carbon rapidly. Our results show that much of this carbon could, in fact, make it into deep-sea food webs, fueling these systems. This is especially important when other food sources to deep-sea ecosystems may be decreasing as our oceans warm.”

Ultimately, this new research reveals that jellyfish blooms could provide far-reaching, potentially important, food supplements to normal deep-sea food webs, rather than having purely negative impacts on fisheries and marine ecosystem function.

—By Marcie Grabowski

Angel Yanagihara, a researcher at the at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa, and William Gillan, an educator at , have produced an educational video, , featuring Yanagihara’s research program on the box jelly and a discussion of her experience as a research scientist.

Developed with funding from the , this outreach project promotes STEM education—science, technology, engineering and math—in public schools and is targeted for middle school students (grades 6–9).

The video inspires young students to pursue their interests in STEM fields, and it has already been incorporated into the curricula of Boynton Beach and Palm Beach County schools in Florida.

More on Yanagihara

Yanagihara is an R–01-funded investigator (R–01 grants from the National Institutes of Health are considered the “gold standard” of research grants), whose work includes intriguing studies which are helping elucidate the field ecology of box jellyfish and to develop effective treatments for box jellyfish stings.

• ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ News video:
• ¶«¾«Ó°Òµ News story:

(Her “sting stopper” helped swimmer Diana Nyad battle stings as Nyad made history swimming from Cuba to the United States in 2013. Yanagihara accompanied Nyad on the swim as her night time box jelly diver conducting repetitive perimeter sweeps and free dives both nights of her swim to assess box jelly threat.

Yanagihara’s patented discovery of a family of fluorescent proteins in blue bottle jellyfish may provide a diagnostic tool in medicine; further research into potential commercial applications is being funded partly through a venture capital fund managed by the University of Hawaiʻi Foundation.

Yanagihara is also looking to unlock the mystery of how box jellyfish reproduce.

—

—By Tina Shelton