Kritter #20

Description

Kritter #20

I first noticed the jellyfish at the city beach of Rovinj over a year ago. When I returned with my camera a few weeks later, they were gone. It wasn’t until a year later that I saw them again—caught in a small bucket, brought into an improvised studio, and photographed in a petri dish.

Back in the studio, I delved deeper into learning about these creatures. I discovered they are called sea walnut and belong to the genus Mnemiopsis, a type of comb jelly. They are characterized by the fact that they lack the characteristic nettle hairs, which prevents them from injuring humans.

I also learned that they have only been present in the Adriatic Sea since 2016. Lacking natural predators and reproducing rapidly, they spread quickly in their new habitats and are therefore widely feared.

However, Luise, a warty comb jelly researcher in Marie Gamillscheg’s novel Aufruhr der Meerestiere, resists the term invasive. Invasive implies an intrusion, an attack. Since the creatures arrived in the Adriatic via the ballast water of empty cargo ships from the American Atlantic coast, it wasn’t the animals who invaded—it was humans who transported them.

In that sense, they are an image of the globalized world order.