Tagging a jellyfish in the Irish Sea
A team of marine biologists from University College Cork have been explaining their work with jellyfish on RTÉ’s “Living the Wildlife” TV series.
The team is led by Dr Tom Doyle, one of Discover Science & Engineering’s Science Ambassadors. Tom and research students Thomas Bastian and Damien Haberlin are members of the EcoJel project, which is studying jellyfish in the Irish Sea.
For a creature that is so common, we know very little about where they come from, what they eat, how they breed and which jellyfish can sting you.
One popular misconception is that the jellyfish that wash up on our beaches every summer come from warmer seas that simply drifted off course and ended up on Irish shores. But the team have identified at least six different kinds of jellyfish that live around our coasts.
Their study will explore the long-term trends in their abundance and their impact on fisheries and aquaculture. The project is a collaboration between UCC and Swansea University in Wales.
One jellyfish which is highly venomous is the lion’s mane jellyfish, and the programme followed members of the team as they tagged some lion’s mane jellyfish in the Irish Sea.
View the clip of the UCC team from “Living the Wildlife” on RTÉ’s website.
Learn more
- Read about the “Big Jellyfish Hunt” on Facebook
- Learn about Tom Doyle’s career as a marine biologist on our MyScienceCareer.ie website
- Visit the EcoJel project’s website, Jellyfish.ie
- Read the team’s guide on what to do if you have been stung by a jellyfish, and download a jellyfish ID card (PDF, 287KB)
