I built a jellyfish laboratory in my backyard [video]

TL;DR: Travis Branwood spent his life savings building a backyard jellyfish laboratory, where he keeps more than 60 species, breeds them, and does independent research on jellyfish life cycles. ## From Koi Farm to Jellyfish Lab Travis Branwood grew up on a koi fish farm, where his dad line-bred specific color morphs of Japanese koi. That early exposure to breeding and aquaculture stuck with him. But jellyfish were always his real obsession. > At the North Carolina Aquarium, [jellyfish are] one of the last exhibits you see, and I would always run past all the other stuff to go see the jellyfish, cuz that's all I really cared about. In high school, he put together a five-point PowerPoint pitch to convince his mother to let him keep jellyfish in the house. She said no at first, then caved. He built his own tank, started keeping jellyfish, and eventually turned the garage into a jellyfish laboratory. That grew into a commercial operation, but after a while he decided he was more interested in the science than the business. About two years before the video, Travis pivoted. He closed up his commercial space, had a garage constructed in his backyard, and moved all his jellyfish in. Today he has a collection of over 60 species of jellyfish — as far as he knows, the largest private collection on the planet. He works as an independent researcher, collaborating with universities and labs while finishing a PhD in biology. ## The Jelly Wall The main display area is what Travis calls the "jelly wall." This is where most of the adult jellyfish are kept in a series of tanks, all plumbed into roughly two filtration systems so he can give different species different temperature, salinity, and lighting requirements. Jellyfish aquariums are hard to find and expensive, so Travis built most of these tanks himself. Many are ordinary aquariums modified to be jellyfish-safe. In each tank, a curved acrylic panel and a screen work with a spray bar to keep the jellyfish suspended in the water column. Key design details: - A spray bar circulates water so jellies spin gently in the middle of the water column. - A screen prevents jellies from going down the drain to the filtration. - Some tanks can be isolated on their own system for species with very specific requirements. The tropical tanks hold Australian spotted jellyfish and spotted lagoon jellyfish. These two look similar, especially when young, but Travis explains the differences: - **Australian spotted jellyfish**: smaller spots, dainty little arms, can get enormous — up to 3 feet in diameter. They originate from Australia but have been introduced in many places around the world, including the Atlantic in certain years. - **Spotted lagoon jellyfish**: bigger blotches, more spade-shaped arms, and only grows to about the size of a softball. ## Moon Jellies and Bay Nettles Several tanks are filled with moon jellyfish. Some of these were wild-caught in Virginia about two weeks before the tour, and Travis is still working on identifying the exact species. He plans to do DNA sequencing in the next month or two. In one close-up, a moon jelly is starting to turn inside out — a sign of stress. Travis notes: > When jellyfish get outside of their preferred temperature range, they do start to do things like turn inside out. They're made out of mostly protein, so you think about like what happens to an egg when you pour it into a hot pan, it goes from being squishy to rubbery. Same thing happens to jellyfish. That particular jelly came from water almost 90°F during a heatwave and drought. Now in a temperature-controlled environment, it should recover. Bay nettles (*Chrysaora chesapeakei*) are another resident. They're the "quintessential classic jellyfish" look — long, frilly tentacles, with a bit of a sting. They live in brackish bays and rivers, not just the Chesapeake Bay, but also the Pamlico Sound, the Neuse River in North Carolina, the Gulf, and other brackish environments. In the summer, millions of them appear. ## The Polyp Wall: Where the Magic Happens Jellyfish have a multi-part life cycle, like a frog or butterfly. The jellyfish stage we see at the beach is actually one of the shorter-lived stages. The longer-lived part is the polyp — a small, anemone-like animal that attaches to the seafloor, shells, or rocks. Polyps can clone themselves, splitting in two to make more polyps. They wait for the right environmental signals — temperature change, salinity drops, longer days — to start producing jellyfish. In the lab, Travis keeps polyps in trays and simulates spring or winter conditions when he wants them to transform. This polyp wall is not as showy as the jelly wall. It looks like a bunch of empty tanks, but each bin contains a separate species of polyp — about 60 species from all over the world. Some are only identified to genus. Some may be undescribed species entirely. Travis points out a bay nettle polyp attached to the glass, with little tentacles, resembling an anemone. At room temperature, it just stays as a polyp, making copies of itself. When he warms the water and drops the salinity, it will start producing baby bay nettles. Some bins are labeled with species names; one is labeled "Danger." ### The "Danger" Box Jelly Travis found those polyps growing in someone's aquarium as a hitchhiker. He recognized them as box jelly polyps, but didn't know the species. He DNA sequenced them and compared them with all known box jelly sequences. They didn't match anything known. He confirmed they're box jellies, probably a species of *Alatina*, but beyond that he isn't sure. > I labeled them danger because you never know what you're working with until we get a positive ID on those. ### Cold and Warm Polyp Systems Most polyps on the wall are held at room temperature, about 20–23°C (68–72°F). But other species need cold or warm water. The bottom system on the wall holds all the cold-water species — about 55–60°F — including West Coast moon jellies, lion's manes, and sea nettles. The system above holds warm-water species from the Mediterranean and Indo-Pacific. ### Blue Fire Jellyfish and Strobilation Among the cold-water polyps are blue fire jellyfish from the UK, the North Sea, Sweden, and Norway. Travis points to one long, skinny polyp that is "getting ready to strobilate." That's the process where a polyp stretches out and cuts itself up into little discs — like a stack of pancakes. Each disc swims off and becomes its own baby jellyfish. ## Ephyra: The Baby Jellyfish Between the polyp and adult stages are ephyra — the tiny, disc-shaped baby jellyfish released during strobilation. Travis's lab has a work area with microscopes set up to display on a TV, used for educational outreach and for photographing different life stages. On the screen during the tour is a type of lion's mane jellyfish from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. ## Raising Food in the Lab Jellyfish need to eat, and Travis cultures his own food in the lab. - **Brine shrimp**: He runs a bubbling brine shrimp hatchery — essentially a "sea monkey" setup. Dried eggs are added to salt water and bubbled overnight. By the next day, there are millions of baby brine shrimp to feed the jellies. He hatches these out every day. - **Rotifers**: Smaller than brine shrimp, these feed on algae and culture themselves. He keeps them in an aquarium and a bucket, feeding them and maintaining water quality so the population keeps multiplying. Rotifers are good for smaller or younger jellyfish. - **Phytoplankton**: Essentially free-swimming algae, cultured in flasks and carboys. These feed the rotifers, which in turn feed the jellyfish — a full food chain in the lab. ## The Atlantic Sea Nettle Project One of the more exciting projects is in a tank tucked into the back corner of the lab. It's full of Atlantic sea nettle jellyfish (*Chrysaora quinquecirrha*). As far as Travis knows, these have never been raised in captivity before. Their life cycle had not been observed. Last year, he collected a bunch from the Outer Banks, spawned them in captivity, and started growing them through the full life cycle while documenting it for the first time. The tank holds the first generation of babies from that batch — currently only half an inch to three-quarters of an inch in diameter. These are difficult to raise because they need to eat other jellyfish. You can't grow them without that in their diet, so Travis has to provide a secondary food source and sacrifice some jellies to feed them. That's what they do in the wild, and that's what they need in captivity. ## Comb Jellies: Not True Jellyfish Travis is interested in anything gelatinous. Box jellies aren't true jellyfish, and neither are hydrozoans. But the comb jellies might be the furthest stretch. The tank holds larval *Mnemiopsis leidyi* comb jellies. In their larval stage, they have two little tentacles. They reabsorb those tentacles during metamorphosis when they transform into their adult form. Comb jellies don't sting. They have specialized sticky cells to capture prey. Taxonomically, they're quite different from true jellyfish. Travis raises them in buckets because that's what they prefer — in the wild, they tend to grow in swampy, semi-stagnant brackish water along the Atlantic East Coast. He feeds them mostly rotifers and phytoplankton; they're not as interested in brine shrimp. Comb jellies move in a unique way: > They beat these plates back and forth like oars on a canoe or something and that's how they move through the water. They don't pulse and contract like a true jellyfish would. They actually kind of beat those comb rows back and forth to row through the water. And that gives them the ability to move like in three dimensions, like a spaceship or something. Because they're so clear, they refract light like a prism, creating a rainbow "disco rave" effect. Those structures are called comb plates. ## Water Upkeep and the Mixing Station With well over a thousand gallons of water, water quality is a constant job. Jellyfish are extremely intolerant of contaminants like metals. Tap water may be fine for humans, but copper and other metals can be lethal to jellies. Travis uses a reverse osmosis filtration system to purify freshwater, then mixes it with aquarium salt. His setup has two vats: one with purified fresh water, one where salt water is mixed. A pump transfers water between them, and the finished salt water can be pumped anywhere in the lab. ## The Mushroom Jelly Tank One large 200-gallon display tank looks like an empty box full of brown algae. But about three months before the tour, Travis collected a very large mushroom jelly that had washed up on the beach. It was mostly dead, but in his experience, jellyfish are never really dead until they've completely fallen apart. This one happened to be a large female with millions of larvae. He moved her into this tank; she lasted another two or three weeks, then fell apart — but she left all those larvae behind. They settled on the walls and turned into polyps. Both sides of the tank are now covered in polyp colonies. Mushroom jelly polyps can be tricky to keep, but they're doing phenomenally in here. So Travis has given them free reign of the tank. The tank itself is another retrofit of an existing aquarium. It doesn't have rounded corners because not all jellyfish tanks need curved surfaces. Spray bars on either side point down and create a gentle circular flow that spins the jellies around. Screens on either side keep them from going down the drain. ## Jellyfish Everywhere: Reef Tank and Axolotl Tank Travis says every aquarium in the lab has jellyfish living in it, even the axolotl tank. The reef tank has fuzzy patches growing here and there — these are thimble jellyfish polyps. In the aquarium hobby, they're known as "colonial hydroids" and considered a pest, but Travis explains they aren't hydroids or truly colonial. They're thimble jellies, actual true jellyfish, living in little chitinous tubes on the reef. He's collected as many as possible from local hobbyists who are happy to give away their "pests," and now they're growing all throughout his reef system. The axolotl tank also turned out to have freshwater jellyfish polyps. Travis set up a 30-gallon planted tank with mostly floating plants. One day he realized there were freshwater jellyfish polyps growing all over the sponge filters — likely introduced on the roots or undersides of the plants. Freshwater jellyfish are in the class Hydrozoa, a bit different from traditional jellyfish. The common freshwater jelly is an invasive species found in most freshwater bodies worldwide. Under the microscope, these polyps don't have long flowing tentacles. Instead, they have tiny bulb-shaped heads with little nub tentacles and a mouth. > If you didn't know what you were looking for, you would probably not notice them. I imagine they're actually probably growing in a lot of people's freshwater aquariums and they don't even know cuz they're microscopic and they don't really look like much. ## How to Follow the Project Travis is open to questions and video ideas in the comments and can make a part two with deeper dives. He also runs an informational website called the Jellyfish Compendium Project at jellyfishcompendiumproject.com, with photos of jellyfish, information about where they're from, ideal growing conditions, and images of different life cycle stages. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MILwxfQBm6Q