A Double Funeral and a New Working Theory

 The inevitable (at least in my opinion) happened and two of the three jellyfish scrunched up their bells for the last time. The first one just disappeared and my daughter couldn't find him. He had gotten so small that we both theorized that he had gotten wedged into the filter media somewhere. He was pretty much written off at that point until the second one died. The bell shape part of it had grown so microscopic that it was nearly impossible to see. All that remained were four long legs and finally, the food stopped sticking to them and so there was no way for it to feed the microscopic stomachs in the bell that we couldn't see. I didn't rush my daughter to make any decisions but after a few days, the legs got stuck to the back wall and she deemed it dead. 

On a side note, how one deems a jellyfish dead isn't as easy as I thought it might be. No pulses or mirrors in front of mouths to see if it still breaths. In fact, if all you can see is legs and those legs gently move due to water currents or impulses from an invisible head, it is quite hard to determine which is which.

My daughter separated out the dead jellyfish and gave the tank a good cleaning for the one remaining and in that process, found a lump of food in the corner along with a clear binding substance. She thought that might be the remains of the first jellyfish but because it was much too small for even her young, sharp eyes to see in much detail, it was only a guess. It too got scooped up and put in the jar with the other dead jellyfish. We found a tree outside down the hill and buried the remains at the base with a few rocks to mark the location. 

The one survivor barely has a head too. I guess essentially their heads are their fat reserves, much like the pot belly of a middle aged man or the thighs and butt of a middle aged woman. When they don't get enough to eat or are stressed enough to not digest what they do eat, they use up their fat reserves. But in the case of a jellyfish, their stomachs are in the middle of this fat reserve and eventually it gets to a point where there is no return. Their stomachs are too small to accept food anymore. My daughter insists that the one remaining jellyfish though is still able to get some food into it's stomach, which since they are translucent, one can see if they have good eye sight. So perhaps their is hope for the lone survivor.

Which brings me to the new working theory. We bought jellyfish food as part of the initial kit and it came in a small glass vial with a cork stopper. It is essentially a fine brownish powder that my daughter partially dissolves in some water and squirts into the tank. It adheres to their legs which they then curl up and somehow move into their stomachs. While cleaning the tank in preparation for the funeral, she smelled the food in the original glass vial and another one in a small plastic pouch that also came with the kit. (I'm guessing the plastic pouch was for a standard kit and since we got the deluxe kit (which included chemicals to maintain the tank that the standard kit does not), the glass vial food is actually part of the deluxe kit. Regardless, the smell between the food in the glass vial and the here to with unsealed plastic pouch of the same food was remarkably different. The food in the glass vial definitely had a much stronger and more pungent smell. This leads us both to the theory that the jellyfish food definitely has a shelf life and can probably go bad. Bad enough that it led to the two former jellyfish being unable to digest it and essentially starving themselves to invisibility. 

My daughter is now feeding the one remaining jellyfish from the plastic pouch food and threw out the remainder of the food in the glass vial. We'll see if we can get the remaining jellyfish to start putting more fat reserves back into their head.