Smithsonian.com

"The Jellies Experience" is at the Monterey Bay Aquarium through September 2014. Image courtesy of Monterey Bay Aquarium/Randy Wilder.

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, jellyfish are a fan favorite—as long as the stinging swimmers are behind glass. Something about the even pulsing of the delicate, bell-shaped creatures has a calming effect on visitors. Some even say their heart rates slow when watching the jellies.

It is this trance-inducing quality that helped inspire the aquarium’s new 1960s-themed, Jimi Hendrix-esque exhibition: “The Jellies Experience.” The show, open through September 2014, is the latest chapter in the aquarium’s history of cultivating and exhibiting jellyfish. In 1985, the Monterey facility became a pioneer in jellyfish display when it exhibited moon jellies for the first time. Seven years later, the aquarium staged “Planet of the Jellies,” its first all-jellies exhibition. A permanent jellies gallery opened in 1996, as part of the Open Sea wing, and in 2002, the aquarium hosted “Jellies: Living Art,” another temporary show. But “The Jellies Experience,” says Raúl Nava, an exhibit developer and writer at the aquarium, is by far the most interactive.

Nava recently gave me a tour. We walked through the exhibit’s six rooms, each centered on a different aspect of jellyfish—their movement, body structure, stinging capabilities, diversity, possible population booms and bioluminescence. Hands-on elements along the way give a sense of what it is like to be a jelly. Press down on one of three waist-high columns in one room, for instance, and you can control the image of a jelly pulsing across a screen. Stand in front of a camera mounted in the wall in another gallery and see a kaleidoscopic image of yourself that mimics a jellyfish’s radial symmetry. Draw a digital jellyfish on a touch screen and free it into a virtual ocean, along with other visitors’ creations. And walk through a mirrored room with three cylindrical tanks of live jellies to experience the illusion of being in a swarm of jellyfish.

The interactive features, however, do not outshine the 16 species of live jellies displayed. Exhibit designer Koen Liem came up with the show’s psychedelic vibe, but as he says, ”the animals are the real stars.” From Japanese sea nettles to upside-down jellies, flower hat jellies to cross jellies and blubber jellies, the creatures, some raised at the aquarium and others collected, are mesmerizing. I found myself studying them and their intricate details—crimped tentacles, fluorescent colors, stripes and spots.

Japanese sea nettles, Chrysaora pacifica, are featured in "The Jellies Experience." Image courtesy of Monterey Bay Aquarium/Randy Wilder.

Here are 14 fun facts about jellies:

1) A group of fish is called a school. A gathering of dolphins is a pod. Several otters makes up a romp. And an assemblage of jellies is a swarm or, better yet, a smack.

2) “Swarm” and “bloom” should not be used interchangeably when talking about jellies. A swarm refers to jellies that collect in one area as a result of strong winds or currents, whereas a bloom is a dense cloud of jellies caused by an actual spike in reproduction.

3) Jellies are 95 percent water.

4) Musician Frank Zappa is the namesake of one species of jelly, Phialella zappai. (For an explanation, see Smithsonian writer Abigail Tucker’s story, “Extreme Jellyfish.”)

5) Though jellies are soft-bodied and lack a skeleton, making fossils rare, there is evidence that jellyfish predate dinosaurs by some 400 million years.

6) A historic moment for jellyfish came in May 1991, when 2,478 moon jelly polyps and babies were launched into space aboard the shuttle Columbia. Biologist Dorothy Spangenberg of the Eastern Virginia Medical School wanted to learn about how weightlessness affected the development of juvenile jellies. She monitored calcium loss in the jellies, which by extension could further scientists’ understanding of humans’ calcium loss in space.

7) Some jellyfish, such as blubber jellies, a delicacy in parts of Asia, are edible. A former colleague wrote about her culinary adventure tasting jellyfish in Washington D.C.’s Chinatown.

8) Most jellyfish live anywhere from a few hours to a few months. But a species of jelly called Turritopsis nutricula may be immortal. The jelly reportedly can play its lifecycle in reverse, transforming from an adult medusa back to an immature polyp.

9) Jellies have been known to eat other jellies.

10) The creatures lack not only bones, but heads, hearts and brains.

11) Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute surmise that cross jellies (Mitrocoma cellularia), common to Monterey Bay in the spring and summer, can “smell” prey through chemicals in the water.

12) A recent study found that four of the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora‘s 24 eyes always point up. The jellyfish looks through the water surface for tree branches. This way, it can swim towards mangrove swamps where it feeds.

13)  GFP, a green fluorescent protein found in crystal jellies, has important medical applications. Mayo Clinic scientists recently inserted a version of GFP and a gene from a rhesus macaque known to block a virus that causes feline AIDS into a cat’s unfertilized eggs. When the kittens were born, they glowed green in ultraviolet light, indicating that the gene was successfully transferred. Biologist Osamu Shimomura won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for discovering GFP.

14) Jellyfish can sting even when they are dead. In 2010, about 150 swimmers at Wallis Sands State Park in New Hampshire were stung by the floating, 40-pound carcass of a lion’s mane jellyfish.

Pickle juice relieves muscle cramps? Image courtesy of flickr user seantoyer.

Midway across the pool, my calf muscle seized up. I grabbed hold of the lane line, pulled my toes back towards my shin and waited for the charley horse to release.

Unfortunately for me, the experience has become a familiar one. It seems that whenever I’m in the thick of training for a road race (and now my first triathlon) or biking a stage ride, I’m wracked with muscle cramps, the worst of which wake me from a sound sleep at night. For relief, I’ve been told to eat bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium, and muscle cramps are commonly attributed to a sodium and potassium deficiency caused by dehydration. I’ve even tried potassium supplements.

But I was surprised last week when I read on Well, the New York Times health and fitness blog, about the latest recommended remedy—pickle juice. That’s right, the sour brine of your classic Vlasic dills. Apparently, athletic trainers, without scientific proof of the elixir’s powers, have been doling it out to athletes pretty regularly. Some readers of the Well blog posted comments saying that they had swigged pickle juice or other homespun remedies—yellow mustard, apple cider, straight vinegar—to ease cramps before.

A study published in the May issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the official journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, provides the first evidence beyond the anecdotal that pickle juice relieves muscle cramps. In the experiment, volunteers biked 30-minute intervals until they reached a level of mild dehydration, had electrical shocks sent to their big toes and then drank either nothing, water or pickle juice at the first signs of their toes cramping. The results showed that pickle juice relieved a cramp 45 percent faster than drinking nothing and about 37 percent faster than drinking water.

There isn’t a consensus among scientists on the cause of muscle cramps. (Or the slang name for a leg cramp for that matter. It’s called a charley horse, after American baseball player Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn (1853-1897) who once limped from third to home base with a leg cramp, in North America; pferdekuss, or horse’s kiss, in Germany; and ijsbeen, or ice leg, in the Netherlands.) But this particular finding befuddles experts even more. If the pickle juice alleviates the cramp so soon after intake (about 85 seconds), too soon to have replenished the needed nutrients in the muscles, then it’s possible the juice activates nerve sensors in the throat or stomach that send out signals to the muscles to relax instead. Hopefully, future studies will sort it out.

In the meantime, I guess we can add pickle juice to the slew of recovery-specific cocktails, like Gatorade Recover 03 and Muscle Milk, that seem to spring up at every race.

If it makes it more appetizing, there’s always the Pickle Sickle?

Shoes or no shoes? That is the question these days. Photo courtesy of flickr user joshuahoffmanphoto.

My husband’s favorite story to tell about his first marathon is that a woman in stocking feet beat him.

“And it was in Vermont…in October…on gravel roads,” he always adds, still amazed at the freakish phenom.

That was in 2006, and now just over three years later, barefoot running, though clearly not the norm, is becoming more common. (Or nearly-barefoot running is, at least.) Just this past weekend, while running on the National Mall, I saw a runner ahead of me wearing Vibram FiveFingers, the lightweight, glove-like shoes now being sold at sporting goods stores.

Runner’s World, Wired, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and the New York Times have all joined in on the “shoes or no shoes” debate. The barefoot contingent argues that running shoes that promise to provide the needed stability or correct pronation issues negatively affect a runner’s form and may also lead to injuries. “We’re being fleeced,” writer and barefoot enthusiast Christopher McDougall told U.S. News & World Report.

In his bestselling book Born to Run, McDougall writes about the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyon who run extraordinary distances (we’re talking up to hundreds of miles) in simple sandals without experiencing the injuries that plague most runners. He uses the Tarahumara to prove that, as humans, we are built for this type of running. Running barefoot, people have a more upright body position and shorter strides, landing first on the middle or ball of the foot, rather than the heel, as is often the case when wearing cushy shoes.

Having run track in college and a marathon since then, I’ve had my share of muscle pulls and stress fractures. So my ears perk with this news of a possible remedy. But it takes more than recommendations from “Barefoot Larry” and “Last Place Jason” on a Runner’s World forum to convince me to lose my shoes. What’s tempted me as of late is the release of two new studies—in the December 2009 issue of PM&R: The journal of injury, function and rehabilitation and another in this week’s edition of Nature—that come down hard on shoes. One found a 36 to 54 percent increase in knee and hip torques in runners wearing shoes versus those who did not.

Experts advise barefoot beginners to ease into it and run barefoot only ten percent of the time. This way, they can toughen up their feet and ankles.

Living in Washington, D.C., I fear the shards of glass on the city’s sidewalks—nothing a pair of Vibrams can’t protect me from, I guess. Then, there are the stares from baffled onlookers. But maybe I’ll get up the nerve to give barefoot running a try…