How do gelatinous animals eat?
Imagine trying to eat your dinner without any teeth or jaws. In fact, what if you didn’t have any hard parts (like our skeleton) in your body. Capturing living prey and consuming it without getting torn apart could be a challenge! That’s why the cnidarian jellies use the stinging nematocysts, and why they can be such a pain (literally!). By using various types of toxins, the true jellies can immobilize zooplankton prey like krill, copepods, larval fish and even other gelatinous animals. The long, thin tentacles, often not visible to potential prey, are studded with batteries of nematocysts. By drifting with extended tentacles in areas of high prey density, food items that contact the tentacles are stunned and killed by the nematocysts. Other nematocysts function more to hold on to the prey. Once subdued, the prey can then be brought to the mouth, and into the stomach for digestion. With their transparent bodies, it’s often easy to see what a jelly has recently consumed. Other gelatinou
